Wicklow nuggets mined from thepast
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF SAT DOWN AT HIS COMPUTER, OPENED UP THE ‘HISTORY IRELAND’ WEBSITE AND EXPLORED THE MAGAZINE’S ONLINE ARCHIVE. HE DISCOVERED THIS NATIONAL INSTITUTION HAD PUBLISHED PLENTY OF WICKLOW MATERIAL OVER THE YEARS.
THE past is a mine rich in fascinating nuggets, as a trawl through the ‘History Ireland’ archive illustrates. The magazine, edited by Tommy Graham, has carried plenty of Wicklow material over the years:
Feagh MacHugh O’Byrne commanded the rebel Irish force which inflicted defeat on the English army led by Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton at Glenmalure on August 25, 1580. One estimate of the casualties put the death toll among the vanquished at more than 900. O’Byrne’s success did not endure and he perished 17 years later, killed in a cave near to the site of the battle where he recorded his famous victory.
The economic importance of fishing to the town of Arklow was underlined by Griffith’s valuation carried out in 1854. The surveyors listed 471 of the 917 houses in the town – just over half – as being in ‘The Fishery’.
County Wicklow was the last of the 32 counties to be declared a county. Moves by some members of the O’Byrne clan have Wicklow so designated in the mid-16th century came to nothing, so it was 1606 before it was added to the roll. This followed the creation of Leitrim as a county separate from Roscommon in 1583, followed by the establishment in 1603 of Ulster’s Donegal, Tyrone, Armagh, Fermanagh, Monaghan, Cavan and Derry. The last mentioned was known back then as Coleraine.
The first man to climb the notorious Eiger in the Swiss Alps was Bray native Charles Barrington.
He performed this feat in 1858 at the age of 24, shinning up the west flank of the 3,970 metre high mountain in order to win a bet. At a time when mountaineering was becoming an organised pursuit, he had no serious prior experience as a climber and he never returned to the Alps. His preferred sport appears to have been horse racing, as he was aboard his own mount Sir Robert Peel at Fairy House to win the first Irish Grand National in 1870.
A chunk of Wicklow granite was shipped to Northern France for a memorial unveiled in 2011, recalling the execution of 11 members of the British Army along with a local businessman by the occupying Germans in 1915. All but one of the 11 were Irish and the memorial was sponsored by the Munster Fusiliers Association. Among the Dublin Fusiliers who took part in World War One was Newtownmountkennedy farm labourer Thomas Errity, a private soldier who perished fighting the Turkish army during the horrors of Gallipoli in 1915.
The wonderfully beautiful Woodenbridge provided the setting in 1914 for a speech delivered by Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond in which he urged nationalists to enlist in the British armed forces and be prepared to fight on the Continent in the Great War. The contents of the speech were widely reported and his own brother William was among the thousands who answered Redmond’s call and died in uniform in France.
Patrick Cogan, who represented the Wicklow constituency in the Dáil, was one of the movers and shakers of Irish politics in the 1940s. Previously an independent, in 1943 he became deputy leader of ‘Clann na Talmhan – The National Agricultural
Party’. They campaigned in the general election of 1943 on a manifesto which sought guaranteed price for farm produce and lower
salaries for top civil servants. This approach won them 10 seats.
A visit by the gloriously quotable Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau to Ireland in 1828 gave the German nobleman plenty of ammunition for his attacks on the British establishment for its tyranny and bigotry. He considered the Military Road which had been built along the spine of County Wicklow and suggested that the road signalled the government’s ‘bad conscience about Ireland’. He also took a swipe at Lord Powerscourt as one of the absentee landlords who ‘strip the people of their last rag and rob them of their last potatoes to enrich the courtesans of London, Paris and Italy.’
Memories of the 1798 rebellion were collected by Luke Cullen (1793-1859) from Little Bray, who spoke to survivors during his travels around North Wexford and South Wicklow. Cullen’s day job was as a teacher at the school attached to the Mount St Joseph monastery in Clondalkin. His name as a member of the Carmelite order was Brother Elias and the monastery, established in 1813, is reckoned to be the first of its kind to take firm root in Ireland more than two centuries following the break-up of such religious houses by King Henry VIII.
According to historian Ruan O’Donnell, Wicklow may have had 14,000 United Irishmen in 1798. When the word came to the rebels, hundreds of them took to the field in the west of the county, with action in Baltinglass, Stratford-on-Slaney and Dunlavin on May 24. Then on May 28 Joseph Holt from Ballinacor led a force of 300 men who hiked through the Devil’s Glen to Annamoe where they torched the home of loyalist magistrate Thomas Hugo.
Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Dale Carnegie helped finance more than 60 public libraries throughout Ireland during a splurge of grant giving which lasted from 1897 to 1913. Bray, Enniskerry and Greystones all benefitted but there was nothing in the £170,000 pot for Delgany. The village’s application was turned down as it was estimated that a library there would have generated less than £20 income per year and the bar was set at £40 per year.
The dispatch of British journalist William Howard Russell to ‘The Times’ sent word of the Crimean War of the 1850s back to London, breaking new ground as a war correspondent. However, he was not the only journalist covering the conflict on the far side of Europe. Also in the field were Irishmen James Carlile McCoan from Tyrone and Edwin Lawrence Godkin from Moyne near Knockananna in County Wicklow. They represented the less up-market ‘Daily News’.
Godkin settled in New York where he founded ‘The Nation’. He was also editor of the ‘New York Evening Post’ from 1883 until 1899.
Bray had its own observatory in Victorian times, assembled by astronomer Wentworth Erck. Among regular visitors who used the telescope there was fellow Irishman Charles Burton who eclipsed his friend in terms of fame. The Bray man outlived his more illustrious friend who died at the age of 35 in 1882, leaving Erck to write Burton’s obituary for publication in the ‘Astronomical Register’.
The Kynochs munitions factory in Arklow was the result of the business acumen of two Englishmen – Arthur Chamberlain and Allan Thomas Cocking. They began production of explosives at a factory in Birmingham but they examined likely sites in Ireland during 1894 for a second plant. Arklow was selected ahead of Brittas Bay and at one time the company boasted that their plant in County Wicklow was the biggest of its kind in the world. However, tragedy struck in 1917 when 27 men died in a huge explosion, followed five months later by an announcement that the factory would close.
It is believed that golf may have been played in Bray as early as 1762. By the early 20th century, the game was more firmly established on the sporting landscape though it was dealt a setback by the outbreak in 1914 of the Great War. Twenty per cent of the membership of Greystones GC volunteered for military service, some of them doomed by the conflict never again to strike a ball again.
Mary Teresa Kearney was born at Knockenrahan near Arklow in 1875 and she was later brought up at nearby Curranstown by her grandmother. She was educated locally before attending the Mercy convent school in Rathdrum to train as an assistant teacher. After turning down a suitor in 1893 she became a nun and became known as Mother Kevin, working in Uganda and Kenya on the creation of numerous primary, secondary, teacher-training and nursing schools as well as orphanages, health clinics and hospitals. She died in 1957.
Elvis Presley, king of rock ’n roll, who died in the summer of 1977 at the age of 42, was a descendant of one William Presley who emigrated from Shillelagh in the 18th century.
Lady Carolina Nairne was best known as a collector and composer of Scottish songs and she was born in Perthshire in 1766 but she spent some of her life as a resident of Enniskerry. Her best-known hit is probably ‘Charlie is my Darling’.
Elizabeth Grant was another Scottish native, married to Henry Smith of Baltyboys near Blessington. She presented an outsider’s view of Irish life in the mid-19th century in her ‘Memoirs of a Highland Lady’.
Doctor Kathleen Lynn took part in the 1916 Rising and established a ground-breaking children’s hospital in Dublin. Originally from Mayo, she spent time up to her death in 1955 resident at her cottage in Glenmalure.
Johnny Kirwan was Wicklow born but came to fame as a soccer player in London as a member of the Tottenham Hotspur side which won the FA Cup during the 1900-1901 soccer season.
ABSENTEE LANDLORDS STRIP THE PEOPLE OF THEIR LAST RAG AND ROB THEM OF THEIR LAST POTATOES TO ENRICH THE COURTESANS OF LONDON AND PARIS