TP’s enduring political legacy
QUESTION Was Irish journalist TP O’Connor Britain’s longestserving MP?
TP O’CONNOR wasn’t Britain’s longest-serving MP, although he was in parliament in London for nearly 50 years. But he was the only Irish nationalist MP ever to represent a Westminster constituency in Britain.
O’Connor was MP for Galway between 1880 and 1885, then from November 24, 1885, he was the MP for the Liverpool Scotland constituency. He held that seat until November 18, 1929, the date of his death.
He had also been the Father of the House, the longest serving MP, between 1918 and 1929.
However, two earlier members of parliament had longer service in the house. Francis Knollys was an admiral, who lived from 1552 to 1648. He was first elected an MP in 1575 and served for a total of 73 years between then and the time of his death.
In the 19th century, Charles Pelham Villiers, who was first elected to Westminster in 1835, had a long period of continuous service, 62 years in total. However, neither could emulate the remarkable successes, especially in journalism, of TP O’Connor.
He had been born in Athlone in 1848 and educated at the College of Immaculate Conception in the town, then he went to what is now NUI Galway, where he was an outstanding student. He won scholarships in history and modern languages and developed a great reputation as an orator. That skill stood him in good stead for his time in parliament, where he made a total of 3,779 speeches.
In 1867, O’Connor began as a junior reporter on Saunders’s News-letter and Daily Advertiser, a Dublin newspaper (1755- 1879 ), then three years later, in 1870, he moved to London, where he became a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph. His mastery of French and German was an immense help in that paper’s coverage of the Franco-Prussian War.
Later, he started several newspapers and journals. He was also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the oldest organisation in the world for journalists; it continues to operate a charity fund named after him.
After his death, a bust of him was put up in Fleet Street, the old centre of London’s newspaper industry. The inscription reads: ‘His pen could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in a few vivid lines.’
He also made his name in politics. After he moved to the Liverpool Scotland constituency, he was re-elected at every subsequent election, always standing as an Irish nationalist. But after the Sinn Féin landslide in the 1918 general election, which spelled the end for the Irish Nationalist Party at Westminster, O’Connor continued to sit as an independent nationalist, even after the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922.
O’Connor was a remarkable journalist and MP, and even though he didn’t have the longest service in the House of Commons, his achievement of 49 years and 215 days as an MP was extraordinary. Mairead Brennan, Trim, Co. Meath.
QUESTION Who invented Top Trumps?
TOP Trumps is a numerical data card game in which players try to win their opponent’s cards by ‘trumping’ them with a higher rated card of their own.
In the 1960s, Austrian company Piatnik created the card game Quartets. Gameplay was similar to Happy Families: there was a deck of 32 cards, divided into eight groups of four – the goal to collect as many quartets as possible.
Piatnik’s innovation was to create themed decks and give every card statistics to use in play, with the idea being that young minds could absorb knowledge while playing with colourful cards with appealing artwork.
An early deck featured German cities, with four landmarks from each place and a short description of their history and statistics.
In 1976, German playing card company Altenburg-Stralsunder released Ace Trumps in which you had to win all of the cards by beating the dimensions and details of your opponent’s cards. With military and transport titles, these were aimed at boys.
The Top Trumps brand was launched in Britain a year later by Dubreq Ltd, which was taken over by Waddingtons in 1982.
F. G. Kelly, Oldham, Lancs.
QUESTION If inert gasses are colourless, odourless and don’t react with anything, how were they discovered?
THE atoms of the noble gases helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon have complete outer electron shells, so they don’t tend to lose, gain or share electrons. This is why they are inert and do not take part in chemical reactions. The first to be discovered was helium in 1868 during a solar eclipse. Scientists were examining the Sun’s corona using a spectroscope.
Different elements produce characteristic bright lines when heated or dark lines when absorbing light from other sources. A bright orange line was observed and it was speculated this was caused by a previously unknown element.
It was called helium after the Greek word for sun, helios. In 1895, Swedish scientists identified helium being emitted from uranium ore. In 1903, helium was found in gas wells in the US.
In 1893, a puzzle about nitrogen was finally solved. It had been known for some time that nitrogen obtained from the atmosphere was slightly denser than the gas prepared in the laboratory. It was speculated there was another unknown gas in the atmosphere that could not be identified by chemical means.
It was found that about 1% of the original volume of air was an unknown gas.
As with helium, it was identified using a spectroscope. This gas was called argon from the Greek
argos, meaning lazy or idle. To accommodate helium and argon on the periodic table of the elements, a new column had to be added. The table not only records what elements have been found, but also predicts what other elements should exist. There were four gaps in the new table.
In 1898, working with the newly invented techniques to liquefy air, three more inert gases were identified: neon, krypton and xenon.
Radon, the last inert gas, was identified in 1900 being emitted from radioactive elements such as radium as it decays, but it was not until 1907 that it was shown that it should occupy the last vacant space in the periodic table.
Though radon is inert chemically, it is radioactive and hazardous to health. As early as the 1530s it was known that miners working in badly ventilated mines suffered a disease we now know to be lung cancer, but it was centuries before the cause was identified.
Denis Sharp, Littlehampton, W. Sussex.