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April 18

Published in On this Day listing

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.

On this Day

1960 Sixty-nine people were killed and 189 others injured when police opened fire on a crowd of c. 5,000–7,000 protesting against pass laws outside the police station in the South African township of Sharpeville.
1920 An t-Athair Peadar Ó Laoghaire (81), scholar and author, notably of Mo scéal féin (1915), died.
1978 Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh (66), jurist and president of Ireland (1974–6), died.
1961 Joseph Holloway, architect and theatrical enthusiast, born in Lower Camden Street, Dublin. Over a 50-year period Holloway attended every theatre performance in the city and kept a journal in which he wrote some 28 million words on Dublin’s theatre world.
1960 South African police opened fire on black protesters at Sharpeville, a black township near Johannesburg, killing 69 and injuring over 180.