Illinois native Margaret Hallem was checking up on her Irish roots at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC when she mentioned her grandmother, who had been due to sail on the doomed White Star liner Titanic but missed the trip owing to bad weather. She then revealed that her family still had the ticket—one … Read more
In 1911 Edward Kenny and his wife Anne lived with their four children, Elleanor (17 years), Josephine (14), Anne (6) and baby Edward (‘1 and 6/12’!), in No.1a Whitefriar Place, Dublin. They shared three rooms with Mrs Elizabeth Monaghan (70) and her ‘relative’ Elizabeth (20), the Kenny family occupying two of the rooms and the … Read more
The film Goodbye Mr Chips (the 1939 version, please) has much to recommend it, not least the delightfully heavy-handed way it has of signalling important dates and historical landmarks as it tells its fifty-year story. Consider the scene on the public-school housemaster Chipping’s first retirement. As he leaves the school gates one evening in June … Read more
During earlier food shortages in Ireland, including in 1822 and 1831, charitable bodies had been set up to provide relief at a local level, and some of these were revived following the first failure of the potato crop in 1845. But after 1846 donations came from all over the world, even from people who had … Read more
On a cold day in March 1796 Aristide Du Petit Thouars, a ci-devant French aristocrat and naval officer just returned from exile in America, visited the Panthéon in the heart of Paris. In his absence France had undergone the Revolution, but with the Terror over, the Bastille torn down and the five-man Directory in power, … Read more