My first memory of 1916 is of being beaten for not being able to name the signatories of the Proclamation, a less effective method of inculcating patriotism than our elderly schoolteacher assumed. Growing up in Bray, Co. Wicklow, the meaning of 1916 was absorbed through other, not particularly ideological, perspectives. Playing with my cousin in … Read more
Francis Vane was born in 1861 at 10 North Great George’s Street, the only son of an English cavalry officer and an Irish-American mother, and raised in Sidmouth, Devon. He was commissioned into the British army in 1878, and from 1900 served in the Boer War as a column commander and a military judge. His … Read more
However acceptable punitive raids may have been in the Middle East, analogous actions in post-war Ireland did not impress some Connaught Ranger veterans of the Mesopotamia campaign. Impelled by the British counter-insurgency campaign in Ireland, elements of the 1st Connaught Rangers mutinied in June 1920. The rebels struck the Union flag at their outpost on … Read more
Protestant lecturers such as Alessandro Gavazzi and ‘Baron’ De Camin became minor celebrities and regularly featured in the British press, touring throughout the country. Despite the focus on Rome and papal hierarchy professed by the majority of lecturers, and the apparent concern for the ‘misled’ and ‘abused’ Roman Catholic, public organisation and championing of such … Read more
John Lee (né Fiott) (1783–1866) was the son of London merchant John Fiott and Harriet Lee of Totteridge Park, Hertfordshire. In 1815, the death of his maternal uncle and guardian William Lee Antonie brought a favourable bequest and a stipulation that he take his mother’s surname. Thereafter Lee divided his time between attending to his … Read more