Most Nobel endeavour
QUESTION Who was the first Irishman to be honoured with a Nobel Prize?
IN 1923, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) became the first Irishman to be honoured with a Nobel Prize, for literature. Poet Yeats, who was born in Sandymount, Dublin, became one of the leading figures of 20th-century literature. He played a major role in the Irish literary revival and was a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
When he won his award, the Nobel Committee said that his work was ‘inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’.
Yet his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922 came after five nominations. The first time his name was put forward was in 1902, when a Trinity College Dublin professor, William Lecky, tried to win international acclaim for the Irishman.
On at least two other occasions – in 1915 and 1921 – Yeats came close to winning the prize. In 1923, with the help of Swedish support and the winds of political change in Ireland, he got lucky.
Yeats’s win sparked a sequence of citations for Irish writers.
Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw won the top prize in literature in 1925. He became the only person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. He won the latter in 1938 for his work on the film Pygmalion, adapted from his play of the same name. Pygmalion would later form the basis of a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady.
In 1969, Samuel Beckett, the Dublin-born avant-garde novelist and playwright who spent most of his life in France, won the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Nobel Committee said that his writing, in new and unfamiliar forms of the novel and stage plays, described the destitution of modern man.
The most recent Irish writer to win a Nobel prize was Derry-born Seamus Heaney.
Heaney, who spent most of his adult life in Dublin, was a prolific writer, winning fans such as Paul Simon, U2 frontman Bono and former US vice-president Joe Biden over a long career. He was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 1989, and published a number of collections over a long and distinguished career, including Death Of A Naturalist, The Cure At Troy and DisIronically, trict And Circle. People of a certain age will remember that his poem Mid-Term Break – recalling the death of his younger brother – featured in a school textbook. Heaney died aged 74 in 2013.
Other Nobel prizes came to Ireland were for political good works. In 1998, John Hume and David Trimble were the co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in securing the Good Friday Agreement.
That came more than two decades after Mairéad Maguire and Betty Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for their efforts in trying to end the Troubles in the North.
In 1974, Seán MacBride had been awarded the same prize. As a younger man, he had been a chiefof-staff of the old IRA, but he went on to become an Irish government minister and a leading politician on the international stage.
He was a founding member of Amnesty International and became a key figure in the early years of the United Nations.
MacBride’s mother was Maud Gonne, the beautiful actress with whom W.B. Yeats famously fell hopelessly in love.
She turned down a number of marriage proposals from the poet and instead decided to marry Boer War hero Major John MacBride in Paris, who would go on to join the nationalist movement back in Ireland. The Mayo man would eventually be praised by his former love rival Yeats in the poem Easter 1916. By the time MacBride was executed at Kilmainham Gaol, he was the father of a 12-year-old son, the future politician Seán MacBride, who died aged 83 in 1988.
Meanwhile, Irish scientists have also been recognised by the Nobel Committee.
Ernest Walton, who came from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, was awarded a Nobel Prize for physics in 1951 for his work with John Cockcroft in atom-smashing research at Cambridge University in the early 1930s.
Walton had become the first person in history to artificially split the atom, thus setting the scene for the dawn of the nuclear age. Most of his career was spent at Trinity College, Dublin.
The most recent person from Ireland to win a joint Nobel Prize was William C. Campbell – who took the accolade for medicine in 2015.
Campbell, who comes from Ramelton, Co. Donegal, but now lives in Massachusetts, got his prize for his work in discovering a new therapy for parasitic diseases caused by roundworms, a major problem in developing countries.
When it comes to winning Nobel Prizes, Ireland is a small country that has punched far above its weight for nearly a century now. It will be interesting to see if we can maintain this impressive momentum.
John Brennan, by email.
QUESTION When and where was the longest traffic jam in the world?
THE longest in terms of time began on August 14, 2010, on the China National Highway 110 (G110) and the Beijing–Tibet expressway (G6) in Hebei and Inner Mongolia. The jam stretched 100km and lasted 12 days.
Crawling along at 3.2km a day, it took three days to pass through the congestion. The cause of the jam was the skyrocketing number of cars in China and the use of the route by trucks bringing construction supplies to Beijing.
those supplies were for roadworks to try to reduce traffic jams.
The longest in distance was the Lyon-Paris jam in February 1980. Hordes of returning holidaymakers, icy conditions and poor visibility caused a hold-up that stretched to 175km over 48 hours. Jeff Holden, Newport, Shropshire.
QUESTION Other than Muhammad Ali, how many Americans refused the draft to fight in Vietnam?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the rock singer Bruce Springsteen dodged the draft by convincing the board he was mentally unfit to go to war.
In 1984, he told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘I got a 4-F. I had a brain concussion from a motorcycle accident when I was 17. Plus, I did the basic Sixties rag, you know: fillin’ out the forms all crazy, not takin’ the tests…I thought one thing: I ain’t goin’.’
He then went on to write Born In The USA, which included the lines: ‘Sent me off to a foreign land. To go and kill the yellow man.’ Colin Britton, by email.
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