ON THIS DAY
Published in Issue 3 (May/June 2017), News, Volume 25MAY
09/1671
Above: Col. Thomas Blood—he switched sides during the English Civil War and gained a reputation for intrigue and espionage.
Irishman Col. Thomas Blood stole the Crown Jewels of England from the Tower of London. Having switched sides during the English Civil War, during which he gained a reputation for intrigue and espionage, Blood lost most of his lands with the Restoration and thereafter conducted a terror campaign against the Stuart establishment. None of his operations were remotely successful. A conspiracy to take Dublin Castle and stage a coup d’état was easily foiled, forcing him to flee to the Continent with a bounty of £1,000 on his head. A year later he reappeared in a kidnap attempt on the duke of Ormond in London, which was also unsuccessful, as was an attempt to assassinate the king as he was taking a dip in the Thames. The theft of the royal regalia was similarly botched. Pursued by the guards, with the crown, globe and sceptre stuffed under their clothing, he and his accomplices were promptly arrested. Yet in terms of outcome the botched robbery was his one big success. Refusing to speak to anyone except the king himself, he admitted to all of his conspiracies and warned the king that he had many friends who would ‘expose his majesty … to the daily fear and expectation of a massacre’. On the other hand, were he free to use his experience in the spying profession as a secret agent for the royal administration, he could prevent such attacks. And his arrogance prevailed. Charles was won over and accepted his offer. Blood lived in comfort on a generous royal allowance for another decade. Whether his services were of any use is not known.
01/1997
The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, won the British general election by a landslide, ending eighteen years of Conservative rule.
08/1567
Shane O’Neill of Tyrone was heavily defeated by Hugh O’Donnell at the Battle of Farsetmore, near Letterkenny, Co. Donegal.
08/1987
At Loughgall, Co. Armagh, an eight-man IRA unit, about to attack the local RUC station, was wiped out by a 36-man SAS unit. It was the IRA’s greatest single loss of life in the recent Troubles. A passing civilian was also killed.
08/2007
‘Devolution Day’ in Northern Ireland. DUP leader Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness (SF) took office as first minister and deputy first minister respectively in a restored Northern Ireland Assembly.
11/1917
Belfast-born Dr David Walker, who served as surgeon, naturalist and photographer on Captain F.L. McClintock’s 1857–9 expedition to the Arctic in search of Sir John Franklin, died.
12/1967
John Masefield (88), poet, notably of ‘Sea Fever’ (1902), writer and Poet Laureate since 1930, died.
13/1917
The first of the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children near the village of Fatima, Portugal (to 13/10/17).
14/1977
Robert Nairac (29), a military intelligence officer, was abducted from a public house in south Armagh and killed by the IRA.
15/2007
Bertie Ahern became the first taoiseach to address the Westminster parliament.
21/1997
Dr Noel Browne, radical politician who was forced to resign as minister for health from the first Inter-Party government in April 1951 over opposition to his ‘Mother and Child’ scheme, died. His autobiography Against the tide (1986) was an instant best-seller.
25/1967
Glasgow Celtic won the European Cup, defeating the favourites, Inter Milan, 2–1. All of their players were born within 30 miles of Glasgow.
29/1917
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States (1961–3), born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of businessman Joe Kennedy and philanthropist/socialite Rose Fitzgerald.
JUNE
15/1919
Above: The crashed Vickers Vimy biplane piloted by John Alcock and Arthur Brown in Derrygimla bog, near Clifton, Co. Galway.
John Alcock and Arthur Brown, in a Vickers Vimy biplane, crash-landed beside the Marconi wireless station in Derrygimla bog near Clifton, Co. Galway, to complete the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Taking off from Newfoundland, they were assisted by favourable winds, sustaining themselves throughout with sandwiches and chocolate washed down with copious amounts of beer and coffee, to complete the 1,900-mile journey in sixteen hours and twelve minutes and claim the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail for a crossing in ‘less than 72 consecutive hours’. It was a big day for the former RAF pilots, who were knighted a few days later by King George. It was a big day, too, for Tom ‘Cork’ Kenny, proprietor of the Connaught Telegraph. He famously got to the bog before the man from the Daily Mail, conducted the first interview with the pair and sold his scoop all over the world. His previous big story had featured the deaths of two RIC officers during the rescue of Seán Hogan by Dan Breen and Seán Treacy at Knocklong railway station, Co. Limerick, some weeks earlier. Both Alcock and Brown died prematurely. In the days when the life expectancy of even a peacetime flier was a mere four years, Alcock, aged 27, was killed just six months later when his plane struck a tree near Rouen in France. Brown went on to work in the burgeoning aircraft industry but never got over the loss in an air crash of his only son while serving with the RAF in June 1944. He died in 1948, aged 62, from an overdose of barbiturates.
02/1567
Shane O’Neill of Tyrone and some 50 of his followers were massacred by the MacDonnells of Antrim.
05/1967
The Six-Day War began, in which Israel heavily defeated Egypt and her Arab allies, capturing the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
07/1917
The start of the Battle of Messines Ridge in West Flanders, in which men from the mainly nationalist 16th (Irish) Division and the unionist 36th (Ulster) Division successfully cleared German forces from the high ground around Yprés.
07/1917
Captain Willie Redmond (56), MP for East Clare since 1891, younger brother of Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, was fatally wounded.
08/1917
The Butte, Montana, mine disaster: 168 died, including many Irish, when fire broke out in a mineshaft. Butte was the US’s foremost mining town at the time, with a population of 50,000, a quarter of whom were Irish, mostly from County Cork.
10/1967
Spencer Treacy (67), acclaimed Hollywood actor who won consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor in Captains Courageous (1937) and Boy’s Town (1938), in which he played the role of Roscommon-born Father Edward J. Flanagan who founded the famous home in Nebraska for delinquent boys, died.
13/1817
Richard Lovell Edgeworth (73), landlord, writer, inventor and father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, died.
16/1917
The remaining 120 Irish political prisoners, including Éamon de Valera, Eoin MacNeill and Countess Markievicz, who were jailed after the Easter Rising were released.
18/1992
In a referendum in the Republic of Ireland over 69% voted to accept the Maastricht Treaty.
20/1867
Clan na Gael, a secret oath-bound organisation, was founded in New York by Jerome Collins, meteorological and science editor of the New York Herald.
26/1917
The first of over one million troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), under General John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, arrived in France.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 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 Irish Plane.
- 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.
May 19
- 1935
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.