Sir, – Marie Coleman (September 21st) displays a lack of historical sense in addressing the value of the pension granted to the widow of William Rowe, the RIC constable who died at the Kent family farm in 1916.
The annual sum of £15 granted to Mrs Rowe would today be worth around £920. The later increase to £50 would now be worth around £3,040 a year; that gave her some £58 a week to live on at today’s value. The pension for an equivalent rank in the army would have been £48.
Given that Rowe had died in the line of duty, the increase was hardly generous.
The £6 and five shilling granted to each child under 16 would be worth around £400 per year or £7.60 a week today.
An attempt to obtain compensation for Mrs Rowe failed.
Dr Coleman fails to add that, while William Kent did not receive compensation for the deaths of his brothers, he received, in 1934, £1,250 in respect of damage to his house during the police raid of 1916. This would be worth over £62,000 today and details of the settlement can be seen on page 7 of the July 20th, 1934, edition of this newspaper. The Kent farm ran to 200 acres, thereby providing an adequate living.
These were certainly “contrasting fortunes” as stated by Dr Coleman, but hardly, as she suggests, in favour of Mrs Rowe. – Yours, etc,
HELEN COBURN,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.
Sir, – The State funeral for Thomas Kent was a moving and dignified tribute. However, I question the decision to use for the funeral a form of the Mass which Kent would not have recognised. The Mass, as Kent knew it, was said or sung in Latin and involved priest and congregation both facing in the same direction. Ironically, despite the liturgy being in a different language, Kent probably “understood” the Mass better than most of us who were brought up with the new liturgical norms. It seems profoundly strange to me to have a funeral for a person who died in 1916 using a liturgy which would have been quite alien to him. – Yours, etc,
NIALL GUINAN,
Athlone,
Co Westmeath.