Charles Sherwood Stratton was born in Connecticut in 1838 or 1839. He had stopped growing at seven months old (although some reports suggest at the age of two). Unusually, he was perfectly proportioned, both as a child and as a man, and this was part of his attraction. It seems that Stratton suffered from hypochondroplasia, … Read more
Outside of Wexford, Carlow was one of the biggest centres of rebel activity in Leinster in 1798, and tales of the rebellion and its suppression at a local level are still emerging. The story of Revd Robert Rochfort (1775–1811) of Clogrennane, Co. Carlow, is a case in point. An investigation into his life and early … Read more
Born in 1775, Rochfort was part of the seventeenth generation to descend from the original de Rochefort settlers and, as such, enjoyed an impressive pedigree in the Anglo-Irish élite. He was named after his great-grandfather, the Hon. Robert Rochfort, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and his grandfather, John (close friend and legal executor … Read more
Eoin MacNeill (1867–1945) was above all a scholar, a historian of early and medieval Ireland, and an Irish linguist. His call for Irish nationalists to establish a militia in imitation of the Ulster Volunteers (in his article ‘The North began’), and his subsequent command of the Irish Volunteers, was what propelled him into a leadership … Read more
The Irish Cyclist presented a fascinating picture of cyclists in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in May 1896, during the cycling craze: ‘To laze away a few hours in the Phoenix Park one of these fine evenings is delightful; and watching the motley train of cyclists that go by is never tiresome. In the early evening the … Read more