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Black ’47

Published in Issue 4 (July/August 2018), Letters, Volume 26

Sir,—Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (HI 26.3, May/June 2018, What’s On Film) has got both the quotation and the attribution to A.M. Sullivan wrong. The actual sentence from a Times of London editorial of 1847, which I read myself while researching a short biography of Terence Bellew McManus in the late ’60s, reads: ‘Thanks to a bountiful providence, the Irishman on the banks of the Shannon will soon be as rare a sight as the Red Indian on the banks of the Hudson’.—Yours etc.,

GERRY McALISTER
Canada

A search of the digitised Times archive of 1847 fails to yield that quotation; its origin is rather contested. For more on its ‘genealogy’, readers (and Mr McAlister) are referred to John Simpson’s ‘Vengeance and the shores of Manhattan’ (http://www.jjon.org/joyce-s-allusions/vengeance).

EMILY MARK-FITZGERALD

On this Day

July 27

1920 Recruitment began, mainly from among demobilised British Army officers, into a new force—the ‘Auxiliary Division’—to augment the RIC.
1939 Michael Longley, poet, notable for ‘Gorse Fires’ (1991), ‘The Weather in Japan’ (2000) and ‘The Stairwell’ (2014), born in Belfast of English parents.
2004 Bob Tisdall (96), Olympic gold medal-winner in the 400m hurdles (Los Angeles, 1932) in a world record time of 51.7 seconds—which was not recognised under the rules at the time because he had hit a hurdle—died.
1866 The SS Great Eastern completed the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable between Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, and Heart’s Content, Newfoundland.

Black ’47

Personal Histories

On this Day

July 27