Nick Maxwell Along with her partner, Esther Roper, and fellow member of the Women’s Trade and Labour Council Sarah Dickenson, Eva Gore-Booth officially established the Barmaids’ Political Defence League in March 1908. The organisation was formed in direct response to the proposed introduction of clause 20 in the 1908 Licensing Bill. Gore-Booth claimed to represent the interests … Read more
The family of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a child of the Anglican vicarage, was at the Ascendancy’s ideological cutting edge and part of its most vulnerable component: a state church imposed on a hostile nation. Born in 1814, he spent his first twelve years around the comparative safety and post-Napoleonic triumphalism of the Phoenix Park … Read more
Abraham (‘Bram’) Stoker was born in 1847, when Le Fanu was hoping to achieve an independent Ascendancy Irish parliament. He was a sickly child, nursed by his formidable mother, Charlotte Thornley Stoker (probably the inspiration for his heroine, Mina Harker). He survived to become a noted athlete at Trinity College. His father had been a … Read more
Hervey organised elaborate games and competitions between local clergymen, inviting his most overweight vicars to splendid dinners without portion control and then ordering after-dinner races over bogland, or calling for jumping competitions on full stomachs. For his delight, he organised cross-community horse-racing along Downhill strand, pitting lean and fit Presbyterians against his own overfed ministers … Read more
The remnants and ruins of Hervey’s vast building projects still punctuate the landscape of Ulster—he ordered the building of stately glebe houses and added elegant spires to plain Protestant churches, determined, as he wrote, ‘to make the County of Derry look like a gentleman’. Most gentlemanly of all are the magnificent ruins at Downhill, where … Read more