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ON THIS DAY

BY AODHÁN CREALEY
 

MAY

Above: Dr David Walker’s photograph of the Fox, captained by F.L. McClintock in 1857–9, one of the earliest taken in the Arctic

11/1917

Belfast-born Dr David Walker (80), surgeon, naturalist and photographer on Captain F.L. McClintock’s expedition to the Arctic (1857–9) which discovered the remains of Sir John Franklin and his crew, died in Portland, Oregon. Though barely twenty years old at the time and with no nautical experience, Walker acquitted himself with distinction on McClintock’s famous expedition. Apart from looking after the crew, protecting them from scurvy, he conducted numerous scientific observations and experiments, using instruments provided by the Royal Society, and collected a huge quantity of flora, fauna and geological specimens. He also took some of the earliest photographs of the Arctic, using the captain’s primitive camera. On his return he was much honoured. Elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Linnean Society, he also wrote the scientific appendix for McClintock’s best-selling account of the voyage. And then, just a few years later, he totally disappeared from that world. In 1865, after an expedition to British Columbia to collect flora specimens, he crossed the border and signed up as an army surgeon with the US Cavalry, then engaged in the Indian Wars on the north-west frontier. Fourteen years later he left the army and became resident doctor and US government land registrar in the infamous Californian gold-mining town of Bodie, and ten years after that moved to Portland, Oregon, where he continued as a doctor. There was no mention of his passing in the British or Irish press. His funeral was private, the local newspaper recording that he had often asked that no display of any sort be made ‘after the sunset call came and his soul passed out to sea’.

02/1519

Leonardo da Vinci (67), Italian polymath of the Renaissance and one of the greatest painters of all time, died at the Château Cloux near Amboise.

03/1469

Machiavelli, Renaissance writer, playwright and poet, author notably of The Prince (1513), born in Florence.

04/1939

In the wake of protests from northern Catholic bishops and Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that conscription would not extend to Northern Ireland.

04/1979

Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister.

04/1869

Tom Lefroy (93), Limerick-born lawyer and Irish chief justice (1852–66) who had a brief relationship with novelist Jane Austen (1795/6), died.

10/1869

The 1,776-mile US transcontinental railroad was completed when the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met in Utah.

13/1919

Two RIC officers, Sgt Peter Wallace and Constable Michael Enright, were killed during the rescue of Seán Hogan by Dan Breen and Seán Treacy, both of whom were wounded, at Knocklong station, Co. Limerick. (See 100 Years Ago, p. 70.)

18/1939

The first aircraft landed on the new airfield at Rineanna, Co. Clare, later known as Shannon Airport.

23/1949

West Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany until German reunification in 1990, came into being.

24/1819

Birth of Queen Victoria, the last British monarch of the House of Hanover, who reigned for 63 years (1837–1901).

26/1819

Jasper Joly, book collector whose donation to the RDS in 1863 of a collection of 23,000 books and unbound papers and prints, notably on Irish history, topography and biography, is now housed in the National Library, born in Clonsast, Co. Offaly.

26/1949

Jeremy Corbyn, trade union representative, MP for Islington North since 1983 and leader of the British Labour Party since 2015, born in Wiltshire.

29/1969

Robert Briscoe (75), Dáil deputy for 38 years and the first Jewish lord mayor of Dublin (1956), died.

JUNE

Above: Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, c. 1602. (NGI)

15/1920

Percival Lee-Wilson (33), RIC district inspector for North Wexford, a marked man because of his brutal treatment of Tom Clarke after the surrender in Easter 1916, was assassinated by the IRA in Gorey. The sudden death of Lee-Wilson, or rather its effect on his young widow, Galway-born Marie Ryan, whom he married in 1914, was a key factor in one of the greatest art discoveries of the twentieth century. In late 1990 Sergio Benedetti, a conservator at the National Gallery of Ireland, was invited to a Jesuit community house in Leeson Street to look over their collection of paintings—all quite routine until he came to The Taking of Christ, attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst. Benedetti was startled. As a specialist in Caravaggio and his followers, he was convinced that he was looking not at a Honthorst—he painted in the same style—but at Caravaggio’s long-lost original, which he painted in 1602 for his patrons in Rome, the Mattei family. What followed was three years of historical detective work. Working through the Mattei archives, two Italian Ph.D students traced its history from commission to payment to the year 1793, when a careless archivist misattributed it to Honthorst. Ten years after that it was sold—as a Honthorst—along with other paintings to a Scottish landowner, and a century later, having ironically been turned down by the Scottish National Gallery, to an Edinburgh art dealer who sold it, in 1921, to an unknown buyer for the princely sum of £8-8-0d. That buyer was Lee-Wilson’s widow, who qualified as a paediatrician in 1928. A devout Catholic, she had gifted the painting to the Jesuits for their support after her husband’s death. She died in 1971.

04/1989

Protesters demanding greater democratic freedoms were fired on by police and troops in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Several thousand were killed.

08/1949

George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four, mostly written on the Scottish island of Jura when he was seriously ill with tuberculosis, was published.

10/1819

Birth of Gustave Courbet, French painter—notably of A Burial at Ornans (1850–1)—and pioneer of nineteenth-century realism.

15/1919

Captain John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Brown completed the first transatlantic flight when their Vickers Vimy biplane landed near Clifden, Co. Galway, after a 2,500km flight from St John’s, Newfoundland.

16/1969

Harold Alexander, Co. Tyrone-born field marshal who commanded Allied forces in Italy (1943–4) and in the Mediterranean until the end of the war, died.

18/1769

Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, chief secretary for Ireland who secured the passage of the Act of Union (1800) and played a crucial role at the Congress of Vienna (1815), born in Dublin.

19/1969

During his brief official visit to Ireland, General Charles de Gaulle hosted a reception in Áras an Uachtaráin for members of the McCartan Clan from County Down—descendants, like himself, of a McCartan who had fled to France in the wake of the Williamite Wars.

23/1919

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.

25/1919

William Martin Murphy (75), founder of Independent Newspapers and leader of the Employers’ Federation during the lockout of 1913–14, died.

27/1939

Kathleen Clarke (Caitlín Bean Uí Chléirigh), widow of executed Easter Rising leader Tom Clarke, was elected lord mayor of Dublin.

28/1919

The Treaty of Versailles was signed, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led directly to the outbreak of the First World War.