1966 The British spy George Blake was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs prison by Limerickman Seán Burke.
1935 Sir Edward Carson, Unionist leader, died.
1641 The Rising in Ulster began when Sir Phelim O’Neill took over Charlemont Fort, Co. Armagh.
1811 Franz Liszt, international piano virtuoso, inventor of the master class and prolific composer, born in Raiding, Oedenburg, Hungary.
1966 George Blake, MI6 spy and double agent for the Soviet Union, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison. His escape, in the fifth year of an unprecedented 42-year sentence, was famously masterminded by Limerickman Seán Bourke who befriended the spy whilst serving a sentence there himself for sending an explosive devise through the post to a police officer. Communicating with Bourke via a walkie-talkie he had managed to smuggle in, Blake, at the appointed time made his way to the perimeter wall, over which he climbed with a rope ladder provided by Bourke. From there he was smuggled to Berlin by two anti-nuclear campaigners where he met his handlers who brought him to Moscow, where Bourke joined him soon afterwards. Blake passed the rest of his life as a guest of the Soviets meeting occasionally with his compatriots Donald Maclean and Kim Philby and passed away in his dacha just two years ago. Bourke’s passing however, remains somewhat of a mystery. Returning to Ireland a few years later, minus his manuscript about the escape which the Soviets retained, he rewrote his account and had a best-seller with The Springing of George Blake (1970). Thereafter his alcohol abuse led to health problems and penury but by January 1982, living in a caravan in Kilkee, Co. Clare, he had sobered up and was writing a book on his life in Moscow and his conversations with Blake. He died suddenly that month and there was no trace of the manuscript or papers relating to it. Some years later an experienced KGB officer who had defected to the United States claimed in his memoirs that he had been poisoned on the orders of the KGB foreign intelligence division.
1641 Sir Phelim O’Neill, MP for Dungannon, seizes Charlemont Fort in Armagh using the excuse that he was coming for dinner. Similar attacks took place across Armagh and Tyrone over the next few days, as members of the Catholic élite who had survived the dispossesion of the Ulster Plantation embarked on what was supposed to be a limited uprising to give themselves a bargaining position in the face of increasingly anti-Catholic noises emanating from across the Irish Sea. This soon gave way to a popular revolt carried out by those Irish who had been dispossessed, which had an undeniable sectarian character as Protestant settlers were targeted for attack. Lurid accounts of the sufferings of Protestants led the colonial government in Dublin to carry out ferocious attacks against suspected rebels (i.e. Catholics in general) across Leinster and Munster and unofficial retaliations by settlers took place across Ulster, as 1641 ushered in a decade of conflict that culminated in the brutal reconquest of Ireland by the English parliament under Oliver Cromwell, whose government eventually executed Phelim O’Neill in 1653. Nevertheless, much of Ireland’s subsequent history exists in the shadow of the rebellion he instigated. By shifting religious division into open conflict it polarised religious identities in Ireland, while the land confiscations that followed the British reconquest set the balance of political and socio-economic power in Ireland for at least the next two centuries. It would be stretching things way too far to claim Sir Phelim O’Neill as the father of modern Ireland or the like, but the consequences of his actions on 22 October 1641 were more long-lasting than most.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the IrishPlane.
1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.
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