September 13

  • 1919 Detective John Hoey, who identified Seán MacDiarmada for the military in 1916, was shot dead outside police HQ in Brunswick Street, Dublin.
  • 1819 James Hack Tuke, Quaker, best remembered for his philanthropic work in Ireland during the Great Famine, born in York.
  • 1968 The first Merriman Summer School opened in Ennis, Co. Clare.
  • 1916 Roald Dahl, novelist, poet and short-story writer, renowned for his darkly comic children’s books, born in Wales to Norwegian parents.
  • 1868 Richard Rothwell (67), Athlone-born romantic painter, died in Rome. His funeral and burial beside the poet John Keats in the city’s Protestant Cemetery were arranged by the painter Joseph Severn.
  • 1860 John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I who was regarded as a mentor by the generation of US generals who led US forces in Europe during World War II, was born in Laclede, Missouri. He was the only person to be promoted in his own lifetime to the highest rank ever held in the United States Army—General of the Armies.
  • 1803 County Wexford-born Commodore John Barry, ‘Father of the American Navy’, died in Philadelphia.
  • 1803 Death of John Barry in Philadelphia. Born in Wexford in 1745, he had emigrated there and embarked on a career as a merchant and naval mariner that led to his becoming the first commander of the US Navy after its establishment in 1794.