Last issue we reported a gaffe by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Now President McAleese has made a bit of a blunder. On a recent trip to Turkey to honour Irish soldiers who died there in World War I, she recalled Ireland’s links with the former Ottoman Empire. In particular she cited the example of Sultan Abdul Majid, who sent three shiploads of food to Drogheda during the Great Famine. In gratitude the town included the Turkish star and crescent in its coat of arms. The Turkish guests at the event looked puzzled, and locals in Drogheda were equally bemused when the story reached them. There is no record of any such shipment reaching Ireland from Turkey, and the town’s coat of arms has had a star and crescent since 1210. Oh dear, our president has been embarrassed on the international stage because of careless research by her staff. Next time she wants to refer to a historical event in a speech, her researchers might run it by us.
Yet more of our heritage went under the hammer as Mealy & Adams auctioned memorabilia from the War of Independence, including the cap badge worn by Michael Collins when he was killed and the letter written by Kevin Barry the night before he was hanged by the British. What price our freedom? Well, the Barry letter sold for over €100,000, bought by the son of a man named in the letter.
In the last issue Museum Eye was not overly impressed by the new-look Ulster Museum. Showing that not everyone follows my lead, the museum is doing rather well in an e-vote for the ArtFund Prize 2010 for museums and galleries. This is a UK-wide competition for the best museum or gallery. At last count it was ahead with a vote of over 25%. Just goes to show that there is no accounting for taste or for who votes in e-polls. Or could it be that I’m out of touch?
Police in Northern Ireland are investigating the suspicious death of John Beresford-Ash of Ashbrook House outside Derry. He was a scion of one of Ulster’s oldest Plantation gentry families. His ancestor was granted land in Derry by Queen Elizabeth I. General Ash built the first Ashbrook house in the seventeenth century but it was burned down by Jacobites during the siege of Derry in 1689. Another ancestor, Michael Browning, was captain of the Mountjoy, the ship that broke the boom across the River Foyle, so ending the siege. Ashbrook House was targeted a number of times during the Troubles and the elderly Beresford-Ash had his own run-in with the IRA. His death marks the passing of one of the last of the old unionist gentry. May he rest in peace.
Over the border in Donegal, a cannon salvaged from the wreck of the Laurentic has been put on public display on Downings pier. The luxury ship was built by Harland & Wolff in 1908. Converted to a merchant cruiser on the outbreak of the First World War, it was sunk by a German mine. What’s more, it went down with a cargo of gold bullion on board. Most of the gold was taken off the wreck in the 1920s, but a reputed twenty gold ingots are still there, 39m down in Lough Swilly. Their value today is estimated at around €8m, so the wreck’s owners are keeping a close eye on it.
To be honest, Official Ireland has shown scant regard for our heritage to date. Think only of Dublin’s Wood Quay and the motorway passing through Tara. But environment minister, John Gormley, has submitted a shortlist of Irish places to UNESCO for consideration as World Heritage sites. Seven sites in the Republic have been shortlisted, including Georgian Dublin (what’s left of it) and Clonmacnoise. But don’t hold your breath: Killarney National Park, Cashel and Clara Bog were all submitted to UNESCO in 1992 and we’re still waiting for an answer.
The internet is becoming an increasingly important resource for researchers, and now another archive of valuable records is available online. Depositions of survivors of the 1641 Rising, mainly from Ulster, were collected for years after the event and were used to support stories of massacres committed by both sides. The depositions on the website were collected between 1642 and 1653 from both Catholics and Protestants. They can now be accessed at the Trinity College website, www.tcd.ie/history/1641.
The Ulster Museum has added a further dimension to its upgrading with the reopening of its art gallery. It features more than 170 paintings, covering four centuries’ worth of art from Ireland and beyond. This is the final phase in the refurbishment and overhaul of Northern Ireland’s regional museum.
OMG! WTF! (as the people who undoubtedly voted for them might say), but the latest list of top ten Irish people of all time has raised a few eyebrows and caused many to choke on their cornflakes. The list, organised by RTÉ, was chosen by the public voting online. It is a sad reflection of the education and historical knowledge of young folk today that the list excludes the likes of Daniel O’Connell and Patrick Sarsfield but includes Bono and Adi Roche. What can we say . . . ?
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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
1972 Ranger William Best (19), a soldier serving with the Royal Irish Rangers in Germany, was shot dead by the Official IRA whilst home on leave visiting his family in Derry’s Creggan estate. The Official IRA called a ceasefire a week later.
1980 After the first of their two summits that year, Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey issued a joint communiqué with Margaret Thatcher agreeing that ‘any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland’.
1932 Amelia Earhart (34) became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, emulating Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight five years before, having set out from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, some thirteen hours and fifteen minutes earlier. When she landed in Ballyarnett, north of Derry City, Amelia Earhart wasn’t sure what country she was in. The story goes that she asked a local farm labourer, who gave the classic reply, ‘You’re in Gallagher’s field, ma’am, have ye come far?’ Apart from her international celebrity status as an aviator, Earhart was also celebrated for her unorthodox lifestyle, famously posting a letter to her husband, George Putnam, on their wedding day, telling him, ‘I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly’. She spent just one day in the Maiden City, during which she was taken to the main post office to phone the United States to confirm the completion of her record flight. Years later the then postmistress’s only memory of her visit was that she never paid for the call. The cottage in the field where she landed was afterwards named the ‘Amelia Earhart Cottage’.Earhart is also remembered for the mysterious nature of her disappearance, and death, in July 1937. On a mission to fly around the world, with her navigator Fred Noonan, she crashed near the Phoenix Islands, a small group of atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In 1940 the skeleton of a ‘tall white female of northern European ancestry’ was discovered on one of the islands.
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.
1919 RIC District Inspector Michael Hunt was shot dead by Irish Volunteers in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, the most senior RIC officer to be killed up to that date.
1916Nationalist delegates at a convention in Belfast were persuaded by the Irish Parliamentary Party’s leadership to accept, by 475 votes to 265, ‘temporary partition’ as a wartime measure.
1908 Luke Livingstone Macassey (c. 65), civil engineer and barrister, died. Macassey is remembered as Belfast’s ‘water hero’, the visionary engineer who brought a reliable supply of clean water to a city whose population had risen from 22,000 in 1807 to 270,000 in 1890 and in so doing probably saved more lives—from typhoid and cholera—than the medical profession at the time. In 1874 the Belfast and District Water Commissioners appointed him as their consultant hydraulic engineer, and he proceeded to build reservoirs above Carrickfergus and Lisburn, which were sufficient for the city’s needs until 1890, when it became clear that drastic action was needed. He and his team investigated five possible sources of water supply, ruled out four (including Lough Neagh) and recommended the Mournes, where rainfall was plentiful and 30 million gallons of water were deliverable every day. Apart from a massive pipeline, a reservoir in the chosen location would be required. The Commission therefore purchased the 9,000 acres of mountain needed for the plans, and in 1905 the pipeline began to deliver water from the Kilkeel and Annalong rivers to a reservoir some 30 miles away to the south of the city, which has provided a plentiful supply ever since. Work then began on constructing a wall to mark the Commission’s catchment area. The famous ‘Mourne Wall’, standing up to 8ft high, 3ft wide and 22 miles in length, which connects the summits of no less than fifteen mountains, including Slieve Donard (850m), was completed by an army of seasonal workers in 1922. Macassey didn’t live to see his proposed reservoir. The Silent Valley reservoir was built between 1923 and 1933 and augmented by the Ben Crom reservoir in 1957.
1918 Sir John French was sworn in as lord lieutenant and supreme commander of the British Army in Ireland.
Above: Col. Thomas Blood—he switched sides during the English Civil War and gained a reputation for intrigue and espionage.
1671 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.
1819 Birth of Gustave Courbet, French painter—notably of A Burial at Ornans (1850–1)—and pioneer of nineteenth-century realism.
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.
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