Dictionary of Irish Biography

The nine volume Dictionary of Irish Biography was published just before Christmas.  A collaborative project between Cambridge University Press and the Royal Irish Academy it has been many years in preparation and may well prove to be one of the most important publishing enterprises ever undertaken in this country.  The dictionary gives the background on Irish men and women who are identified as having made a significant contribution in Ireland or abroad, as well as those born overseas who had noteworthy careers in Ireland.

Up to now anyone interested in the biographical details of Irishmen and women had to rely on a number of different publications, the first of which was James Wills six volumes, ‘Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Irishmen’ published in 1847.  Alfred Webb was the Author of ‘Compendium of Irish Biography’ published by Gills of Dublin in 1878 and half a century later John S. Crone was the author of ‘A Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography’.  A more up to date work was Henry Boylan’s ‘A Dictionary of Irish Biography’ first published in 1978 and now in its third edition.

In the intervening years other specialised biographical dictionaries relating to the Irish have been produced, including Richard Hayes’ ‘Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France’ and Louis McRedmond’s ‘Modern Irish Lives’, not forgetting the nine volumes produced to date in Irish of ‘Beathaisnéis’ under the editorship of Maíre Ní Mhurchú and Diarmuid Breathnach.

The newly published Dictionary of Irish Biography is truly the most comprehensive and authoritative biographical dictionary yet published in relation to Irish persons.  Containing 9,014 biographical articles covering a time span from the beginning of written records to the end of 2002 it does not include biographies of any persons living after that latter date. 

I spent the Christmas period going through the nine volumes with a view to noting those persons with Athy connections.   I ended with a list of 58 names, some of which had slight enough links with the town such as Patrick Delaney, Clergyman and writer born in 1685 who was educated in Athy.  He was a friend of Sheridan and Swift and his second wife was the artist Mary Graville who as Mrs. Delaney wrote her autobiography which remains a valuable source of information about the social history of her time.  Delaney himself became Dean of Down and as a writer produced several publications.  His bust is in the Long Room in Trinity College.

His namesake, Malachy Delaney, from Ballitore is also included in the Biographical Dictionary.  Delaney was a prosperous farmer who left Ireland and enlisted in the Austrian Army to escape punishment for some crime or other but who later returned to join the United Irishmen.  As leader of the Rebels in the Ballitore area he lead the ambush of the Tyrone Militia on the Narraghmore Road in 1798 and following the collapse of the Rebellion escaped capture by going into the Wicklow hills.  He later took part in Emmet’s Rebellion and served time in Kilmainham Jail before being released in or about 1805.  He died in March 1807 aged about 50 years. 

Lettice Digby, the only child of Lord Offaly and grandchild of Gerald, 11^th Earl of Kildare, is also included in the dictionary and her relevance to Athy arises out of her possession of the manors of Woodstock and Athy.

Ownership of property in this or any other area did not concern Johnny Doran, uilleann piper and a member of the travelling community.  Johnny was a celebrated musician who often passed through and in all probability played his uilleann pipes in the town of Athy.  He was camped near Athy when his health broke down in the autumn of 1949 and had to be admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital.  There he remained under the care of Sr. Dominic and her staff until he died on 19^th January 1950 and it was in St. Vincent’s Hospital that the legendary Johnny Doran played the uilleann pipes for the last time.

One man whose links with South Kildare were previously unknown to me was George Downes, born 1790, died 1846.  Described in the dictionary as a travel writer and topographer, he was educated in Ballitore school after being befriended by the Shackletons.  He later entered Trinity College from where he graduated with an M.A. in 1823.  Downes wrote a number of books on his travels throughout Europe and later worked with George Petrie on the Ordnance Survey and assisted him in his published work on ‘The Round Towers of Ireland’.  As a poet he was noted in the ‘Poets of Ireland’ by D.J. O’Donoghue.  Downes, who was unmarried, died in Dublin in 1846 and is buried in the Quaker graveyard at Ballitore.

William Harvey Du Cros was another South Kildare man whose story is told in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.  Born in Moone during the Great Famine Du Cros was a sportsman who won honours in fencing, boxing and captained Bective Rangers Rugby Club to win an Irish championship.  As President of the Irish Cyclists Association he was approached in 1889 by associates of John Dunlop, the inventor of the pneumatic tyre, following which Du Cros established a company to produce the new tyres.  This eventually led to the founding of the Dunlop Rubber Company in England which was headed up by Du Cros.  He was in part responsible for the introduction of taxi cabs in London but failed due to the opposition of the Dublin jarveys to have similar cabs brought into the Irish capital.  He died in Dublin just a month after the ending of World War 1.

One entry in the new dictionary has solved a mystery which has puzzled me for some time.  William Grace, the first Catholic Mayor of New York, an office he held from 1880 to 1882 and again from 1884 to 1886, was noted in all previous accounts of his life as having been born in Cork.  Sometime ago I came across a reference in one of the Athy Urban District Council Minute Books of a letter from an American woman seeking information on Mayor Grace whom she claimed was born just outside Athy in County Laois.  My research tended to show that Grace was from Gracefield, yet the many references to his Cork background left me in some doubt.  The dictionary confirms that he was born in 1832 in Riverstown, Co. Cork, while his parents James and Ellen Grace from County Laois were on holidays.  William Grace died in New York in 1904 and the company he founded still operates in America as a leading player in the chemical industry.

I intend to return to the Dictionary of Irish Biography as time allows over the next few weeks to deal with more of the men and women from this area whose stories are included in this new publication. 

 

FRANK TAAFFE    

Dictionary of Irish Biography (2)

A few ‘Eyes’ ago (No. 896 to be exact) I wrote of the newly published Dictionary of Irish Biography and drew attention to some of those included in the multi volume publication who had links with the town of Athy.  I propose today to delve a bit more into the nine volumes of this indispensible reference work to tell the stories behind some of those who once walked the streets of our town.

Thomas Grattan Colley, previously featured in this column and in the Irish Biographical Dictionary he receives extensive coverage as befitting a man who was a diplomat and a noted writer.  Colley, who was born in Dublin in 1781, came to live in Athy with his parents and other family members when the Grattan Colley family home was destroyed during the Rebellion of 1798.  They were part of the great influx of Loyalists, who fearful for their safety, descended on the garrison town of Loyalist Athy in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of rebellion.  He was educated, we are told, by a clergyman in Athy whom I imagine was Reverend Nicholas Ashe, a local Presbyterian minister.  Ashe was also Sovereign of Athy during the early part of 1798 and as such presided over the local Borough Council.  To his credit he did what he could to keep the local Loyalist militia from harassing the Roman Catholic population.  His efforts, as evidenced in his letters to the Duke of Leinster, left him ostracised by the militant Protestants led by Thomas Rawson of Glassealy, particularly so when he refused to sign a memorial from what was described as ‘The Loyal Protestant Corporation of Athy’, calling on the Dublin Castle authorities to authorise the establishment of an infantry militia in the town which Ashe felt ‘would exclude our Catholic neighbours’.

Grattan Colley studied for a career in law but gave it up to enlist in the Louth militia.  His military career was not successful and having married and settled in France he took to writing for a living and for a time acted as a correspondent for the London Times.  He was later appointed as the British Counsel to Boston and played an important role in settling the border dispute between America and Canada.  After returning to London Grattan Colley according to ‘The Longman Companion to Victorian Literature’ spent many years ‘churning out volumes of commentary on Anglo American affairs and a number of inferior volumes.’  His best known works included ‘Legends of the Rhine’ and his book of reminiscences ‘Beaten Paths and Those who Trod Them’.  He died in London in 1864.

Nearer to our time was Dr. Juan Nassau Greene, a farmer and medical doctor who was born in 1918 in Argentina.  His parents were natives of Kilkea, his father John being the third generation of the Greene’s to live in Kilkea House.  The family returned to Ireland when Juan was a child and the future president of the N.F.A. attended school at Kilkea before going on to St. Columba’s College and later Trinity College.  After graduating as a medical doctor in 1941 he enlisted in the R.A.F. and served for the duration of the Second World War in Britain, Burma and India.  After the war he worked in St. Patrick Duns Hospital, but retired in 1948 to concentrate on farming.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography gives to Juan Greene the honour of being president of the first Macra na Feirme club in Athy in 1944.  However it was, I believe, his father John Nassau Greene who held that position but Dr. Juan did become the inaugural president of the National Farmers Association in 1955. 

Soon after his return to south Kildare in 1948 Dr. Juan became active in the Beet Growers Association and that Association in conjunction with Macra na Feirme held a number of meetings which eventually led to the setting up of the National Farmers Association.  It was Dr. Juan Greene who at a meeting in the Four Provinces Ballroom Dublin on 6^th January 1955 formally proposed the setting up of the N.F.A.  He was to be the association’s first president, a position he held from 1955 to 1962.

The Biographical Dictionary states that ‘the subsequent flourishing of the N.F.A. and its successor, the Irish Farmers Association, as powerful representative organisations, owed much to Greene’s idealism, energy and organising sagacity through the formative years.  Modest and unassuming he pursued a low key self effacing leadership style, preferring  quiet behind-the-scenes negotiation to public posturing and earned wide respect for reasonableness and integrity.  His position being full time and unpaid and involving considerable personal expense and extensive travel throughout the country he worked tirelessly to the ultimate detriment of his health.’  Dr. Juan Nassau Greene died in the Richmond Hospital Dublin on 9^th November 1979 and was buried in Kilkea cemetery.  His premature death deprived this country and especially the Irish farming community of one of the most influential men of his generation.

Another local man, but one I must confess I had not previously known of his Athy connection, was John Semple Jackson, born in 1920, the fifth child of Francis Jackson and his wife Annie of Farmhill, Athy.  He was educated in the local Model School which sadly was consumed by flames within the last few weeks.  After attending St. Columba’s, Rathfarnham, he returned to Athy to work for a while in his father’s business at Leinster Street.  He joined the R.A.F. in 1943 and it is said that flight training over North America stirred a lifelong interest in geology following which he enrolled in Trinity College Dublin from where he graduated with a B.A. in geology and zoology.  Appointed to the staff of U.C.D. in 1951 he continued his geological investigations and studies, resulting in the award of a Ph.D. and in 1957 he was appointed keeper in Dublin’s Natural History Museum.  Eleven years later he commenced practice as a geological consultant and before long was a member of a number of government working parties for the preparation of inventories of outstanding landscapes and sites of scientific interest in Ireland.  He was at various times between 1964 and 1977 the secretary, chairman and national president of An Taisce.  He lectured on environmental conservation to architectural students and contributed to radio and T.V. debates on conservation and mining issues.  He donated his extensive library to the Department of Geology, University College Cork in 1982 where it is now housed in the John S. Jackson Library.  He died suddenly in November 1991 and is buried in County Cork. 

I will return to the Dictionary of Irish Biography over the coming months.

I had a query during the week concerning the Athy Social Club Players who performed Mary Mullans’ play, ‘The Turn of the Wheel’ on the last night of the Kildare Drama Festival in 1959.  Fortunately I have a programme for that play when it was put on in St. John’s Hall in February 1959.  The three act play featured Christine O’Donohue, Jim Gardner, Len Hayden, Jo Lawler, Florrie Lawler, Dermot Mullan, Ger Moriarty and Patsy O’Neill.  It was produced by Tadhg Brennan and the Athy performance was followed by a one act Irish adaptation of a celebrated French play.

Do any of the readers remember the performances in St. John’s Hall of ‘The Turn of the Wheel’ and more particularly does anyone have a photograph of the cast of that play?  I would be delighted to hear from anyone who can help me.