BY AODHÁN CREALEY
MARCH
14/1880
Hazel Martyn was born in Chicago, the daughter of Edward Jenner Martyn, a wealthy industrialist. Hazel’s early life was dominated by her mother, whose ambition for her daughter was a refined education, a suitable marriage and consequently a prominent place in the city’s fashionable society. She succeeded at first, sending Hazel to the best schools and encouraging her, in 1903, to accept the hand of Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr, a prominent physician. A talented artist, Hazel travelled to France that same year and visited an artists’ colony at Beg-Mail in Brittany, where she met a man with a totally different background from that of her proposed suitor. A much-respected society painter back in Britain, Irishman John was some 24 years older than her, but they soon became close friends. One can only imagine their courtship. John was no doubt highly impressed by this refined and stunningly beautiful American. She, once accustomed to his north Belfast drawl, was equally impressed by his working-class back story and artistic talent. But the friendship was quickly suppressed. Arriving without notice at Beg-Mail, her mother convinced Hazel that the Irishman was in an unreliable profession and in any case was much too old for her. Hazel duly married the physician and bore him a daughter, Alice, before his unexpected death a mere five months later. Soon afterwards her domineering mother passed away, and Hazel moved to London with her daughter. There she renewed her relationship with John and the couple married some five years later. John, of course, was John Lavery, later Sir John Lavery, and she Lady Hazel Lavery, whose image would become familiar to generations as Kathleen Ní Houlihan on Irish banknotes from 1928 to 1975.
01/1965
Following a state funeral, the remains of Sir Roger Casement, who was executed and interred in Pentonville Prison, London, in 1916, were reinterred in Glasnevin cemetery.
06/1935
Ronnie Delany, who won a gold medal for Ireland in the 1,500 metres at the Olympic Games in Melbourne (1956), born in Arklow, Co. Wicklow.
08/1925
Paddy Devlin, socialist and labour activist, founding member of the SDLP and Stormont MP, born in the Pound Loney in the Lower Falls, West Belfast.
11/2020
The first death linked to Covid-19 was recorded in Ireland. The elderly woman died in a Dublin hospital and was understood to have had an underlying respiratory condition.
16/1975
Mildred Harrison (26), a Reserve RUC officer, was killed when a UVF bomb exploded on a window ledge outside a Catholic bar in Bangor, Co. Down, as she was passing by on duty. She was the first policewoman to die in the Troubles.
17/1725
Cicily Jackson, a young servant girl, was burnt at the stake before large crowds at Bishopsgate, just outside the walls of Derry City, having been convicted of murdering her own ‘natural born child’. In the light of new evidence on her case, it is expected that she will be pardoned.
19/1975
Gideon Raphael, Israel’s first ambassador to Ireland, presented his credentials to President Ó Dálaigh.
APRIL
16/1660
Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, born in Killyleagh, Co. Down. Sloane was the Ulsterman whose massive collection of some 50,000 books and 3,500 manuscripts, along with hundreds of artefacts collected when he was physician to the governor of Jamaica (1685–7), formed the basis of the British Museum. His name hit the headlines some five years ago when it emerged that his Jamaican collection was mostly harvested by slave labour, in response to which the museum removed his bust—which few visitors noticed anyway—and placed it in a much more visible cabinet along with commentary on the sordid nature of the British Empire. The man himself, who succeeded Isaac Newton as president of the Royal Society, was a dedicated physician, serving royalty and the aristocracy in the morning and afterwards all and sundry, rich and poor, very often pro bono. He was also quite an innovator. An early advocate of inoculation against smallpox, he inoculated several members of the royal family and made his mark, too, in British history. Attending Queen Anne on her deathbed (1714), he famously kept her alive long enough to sign a document that ensured the Hanoverian succession. And as most Northern school pupils will remind you, he didn’t actually invent drinking chocolate but sourced a palatable version in the Caribbean, which was later successfully marketed by Cadbury back in England. He lived into his 90s, no doubt having acted on the maxim that he often repeated to his patients: ‘I never take physic when I am well. When I am ill, I take little and only such as has been very well tried.’ Commemorated by Sloane Square and Hans Place in London, he is honoured by a splendid museum in his native town.
03/1925
Anthony ‘Tony’ Neil Wedgwood Benn, Labour Party politician and political activist, MP for Bristol South East/Chesterfield for 47 years, born in Westminster.
05/1975
Nine civilians were killed and dozens injured in a UVF attack on a public house in north Belfast and two IRA attacks on public houses on the Shankill Road.
06/1955
Sir Anthony Eden (Conservative) succeeded Winston Churchill as British prime minister.
09/1875
Sir John Gray (59), proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal since 1841, who grew the paper’s circulation from a few thousand copies per day to c. 10,000 at the time of his death and who, as chairman of Dublin Corporation, oversaw the provision of a fresh water-supply to Dublin City and suburbs, died.
17/1875
Charles Stewart Parnell was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election as a Home Rule MP for Meath. He later sat for the constituency of Cork City (1880–91).
19/1775
Skirmishes in Concord and Lexington marked the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Half of Washington’s Continental Army were Irish, whilst there were two Irish regiments on the British side. Two men in particular on the British side, General Charles Cornwallis and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, were to become prominent figures, on opposite sides, in the third revolution of the late eighteenth century—1798.
28/1975
Billy McMillan (48), OC of the Official IRA, was shot dead by the INLA off the Falls Road, Belfast.
30/1945
Adolf Hitler (56), chancellor of Germany from 1933, and Eva Braun, his wife of one day, committed suicide in the Führerbunker in Berlin.