Sir, — Joseph O'Connor has written recently in your paper of the "heroes … forgotten by Official Ireland and Official Britain" ("Older legacy fades by popular demand", April 4th) in reference to the tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, doctors, nurses, etc, who never expected to be remembered. Yet what of their heroes, the contemporaries they were not allowed to celebrate?
I have been putting together biographies of some of those who enjoyed fame here before the emergence of “Irish-Ireland” between the 1880s and the 1920s saw them written down or out of history altogether: men and women who fell between two stools – not Irish enough to be remembered in their homeland, and not British enough to be imperial heroes.
There was William J Lawrence, a self-taught Protestant Northerner who was forced to find a living in America, where he became a Harvard professor and the toast of the nation’s Ivy League universities. Austin Clarke and TS Eliot berated Ireland for their failure to acknowledge him as the “supreme authority” in his field of Shakespearean studies. Lawrence spent his last decades exiled from the Dublin he loved and died “poor and disappointed” in London.
Joe O’Gorman, a fiery former plumber, trade unionist and comedian from Dublin, fought for tolerable conditions for tens of thousands of workers by organising the “Music Hall War”, a 1907 strike. Although encouraged by friends like Jim Larkin and TP O’Connor MP to stand for parliament for Labour, O’Gorman stayed on the stage but suffered blackballing by every music hall in Britain for being a Larkinite. As the “Uncrowned King of British Music Hall” he starred on Broadway and the London Palladium, and was part of the first modern cross-talking duo, subsequently copied by such acts as Laurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise.
Or Mary Connolly, a Dorset Street tenement girl, whose patrons – Ballsbridge doctors, Belfast dockers and James Joyce’s voice coach – helped her become one of the highest-grossing acts in British music hall and variety theatre in the years after the first World War. Although she single-handedly saved the Olympia theatre from bankruptcy and the wrecker’s ball, having taken the soup of the British stage she died forgotten, and her final burial place is unknown.
Or two ex-British soldiers, John King from Moy, Co Tyrone, and Robert O’Hara Burke of Galway, who to this day remain among Australia’s greatest heroes but are virtually unknown in Ireland. King was the only survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition that became the first to cross Australia – it was the Victorian equivalent of the moon landing.
With a view to a book, I am gathering other biographies and would be delighted to hear from anyone with any “names”, or indeed with any further knowledge of those I have mentioned. Yours, etc,
ERIC VILLIERS,
The Thatched Cottage,
Tirnascobe Road,
Armagh BT61 9HX