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September 17

Published in On this Day listing

1937 Ten male seasonal workers aged between 13 and 21 years from Achill Island, Co. Mayo, perished in a fire in Kirkintillock, Scotland.
1918 Chaim Herzog, sixth president of Israel (1983–93), born in Belfast, the son of Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Ireland’s Chief Rabbi (1919–37).
1862 The battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg, western Maryland, the bloodiest single day in the American Civil War and in all of American history—22,000 killed or wounded, including 540 from the Union Army’s Irish Brigade.
1711 John Holwell, surgeon, East India Company employee and author of A genuine narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen and others who were suffocated in the Black Hole (London, 1758) about hispart in the alleged ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’incident of June 1756, born in Dublin.

That field of glory. The story of Clontarf, from battleground to garden suburb
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Darkest Dublin: The story of the Church Street disaster and a pictorial account of the slums of Dublin in 1913
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On this Day

1936 King Edward VIII abdicated after a reign of just ten months, prompting the biggest constitutional crisis for the British monarchy in the twentieth century.
1920 The IRA ambushed an RIC patrol near Victoria Barracks, Cork. Black and Tans later set fire to parts of the city. The government claimed that the arson was inflicted by citizens of Cork, but later paid £3m compensation.
1918 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, historian and short-story writer—notably of The Gulag Archipelago (1973)—and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1970), born.
1862 The Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during which the Irish Brigade secured its reputation for gallantry with a suicidal charge against impregnable Confederate defences, began. The four-day engagement ended in victory for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.