Standish Hayes O’Grady, who died 100 years ago on October 16th, seemed an unlikely convert to Gaelic Irish scholarship. His grand-uncle, as attorney general, had prosecuted Robert Emmet, and his admiral father, who served Lord Nelson, distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Wars.
WB Yeats, in his Essays and Introductions, summed up well how O'Grady positioned himself between two worlds: "That great scholar Hayes O'Grady would not join our non-political Irish Literary Society because he considered it a Fenian body but boasted that although he had lived in England for 40 years, he had never made an English friend."
His cousin, Standish James O’Grady, had a great influence on the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival, and Yeats wrote that both cousins “considered themselves as representing the old Irish land-owning aristocracy; both probably . . . thought that England, because decadent and democratic, had betrayed their order”.
Hayes O’Grady was born in May 1832 in Erinagh House, near Castleconnell on the Clare-Limerick border.
Fostered
He learned the Irish language (as well as the local poetry and folklore) from native speakers in his neighbourhood and it may be that he was fostered for a time with an Irish-speaking family of the district.
It seems that by the time he was sent to attend school at Rugby in Warwickshire, he could speak Irish because there is a reference to him speaking to some passing Irish labourers there in their native tongue (see Diarmuid Breathnach and Máire Ní Mhurchú on ainm.ie).
He attended Trinity College Dublin from 1850 to 1854, where he studied engineering but Irish literature absorbed far more of his attention. In 1853, he edited The Adventures of Donnchadh Rua Mac Con Mara, who was an 18th-century poet, teacher, wanderer and rogue from Clare. That same year, the Ossianic Society was formed to study the "Fenian cycle" or tales of the ancient Fíanna. He was on the founding committee and later became the society's president. Among its transactions, it published his edition of Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne.
He worked as a civil engineer after graduating and emigrated to the United States in the late 1850s.
It is difficult to establish what exactly he did there but it seems he spent some time working in gold mines and on coastal schooners; he could well have experienced some hardship during the long period he spent in the western part of America.
He also travelled to other countries where he continued to develop his great interest in languages and cultures. The Gaelic scholar Eleanor Hull, who studied under him, described him as reluctant to talk about those times but she got the impression that some of the things he was forced to do to earn a living were less than pleasant.
He applied for the position of professor of Celtic in Edinburgh University in 1882. Among those who supported his application was William Wright, professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, who testified to his knowledge of languages and particularly Arabic. The German Celtic scholar Ernst Windisch credited O’Grady with much of what he himself knew of Celtic studies.
His application was unsuccessful and in 1886, he began to catalogue the Irish manuscripts in the British Museum. Due to disagreement with the museum authorities, he gave up the work in 1892, and by the time he resumed it, health problems meant he was unable to finish it.
The catalogue was completed by Robin Flower, who paid warm tribute to the work of his predecessor.
However, it was Silva Gadelica, published in 1892, that earned Hayes O'Grady much scholarly attention and praise. It consisted of two volumes, the first comprising Irish texts and the second translations and notes; the work was mainly taken from the medieval Irish manuscript, the Book of Lismore. His pupil Eleanor Hull, whom he helped to write The Cúchulainn Saga in Irish Literature (1898), described his translation as "forceful, idiomatic and vigorous, rising at times to the largeness of epic prose" and "peculiarly suited to these old primitive tales" (ainm.ie). Cambridge University awarded him a doctorate in 1893.
His love for the Irish language and literature never undermined his political unionism.
Both he and his more famous cousin believed Ireland was better in the United Kingdom and that the Anglo-Irish should become Ireland’s natural leaders.
However, their view that aristocratic paternalism could somehow satisfy Irish social and political aspirations in the early 20th century was impractical, to say the least.
Hayes O’Grady spent his latter years in Hale, Cheshire, where he died. He is buried in Altrincham.