In 1831 legislation was enacted at Westminster to consolidate Irish public works departments under a new body, the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, commonly known, like its Georgian predecessor, as the Board of Works. It was not until after the retirement of its first architect, the Welshman Jacob Owen, in 1856 that its remit … Read more
The cause of the ‘ambulances’ in the Franco-Prussian war was a popular one on both sides of the conflict. It did not infer mobile ambulances but more often was a reference to the setting up of field hospitals. Names as diverse as Kitchener, Sarah Bernhardt and Nietzsche were involved in the ‘ambulances’ during the war, … Read more
Irish service in the armies of France dated back to the ‘Wild Geese’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and officially ended in 1792, when the ‘Irish Brigade’ was disbanded. The French Foreign Legion was created 40 years later, in 1831, as a unit for foreign volunteers, primarily to protect and extend France’s overseas empire. … Read more
In 1920, six years before Hollywood made the film Beau Geste, Bray and Arklow doubled for North Africa in another, less famous silent film about the French Foreign Legion made by the Celtic Cinema Company, entitled Rosaleen Dhu. Based on a story by John Denvir, the film tells the romantic tale of an exiled Fenian … Read more
Professor Mezzeroff traded as a scientist associated with Russian nihilism and as a teacher of ‘the arts of scientific warfare’ to revolutionary movements. He lectured to groups of Cuban nationalists in New York and boasted that he had taught the ‘doctrine of dynamite’ to Gambetta. His true identity was never clear, and local reporters often … Read more