I have been a Humanist Celebrant for 22 years and a Humanist and atheist since my teens. I was brought up in Catholic Ireland, attended convent schools, had an uncle a priest and my mother’s cousin was Edel Quinn, a missionary, who is on a waiting list for canonisation. By the time I emigrated I was not a religious believer and realised that religion was made up by men and deeply misogynistic. Like many people brought up in the religion of their parents I rejected it. The 34th annual British Social Attitudes Survey has shown that non-religious people represent a clear majority of British people in 2017, accounting for 53% of the population. This is a new high for the non-religious population and rises to 74% for those aged 18-34.
Having attended funerals for people who were not religious, with C of E vicars officiating, I decided it was time to join the British Humanist Association because, by then, I had a degree in Philosophy and thought it was time I committed to the only organisation which reflected my beliefs. The labels atheist or ‘ and none’ do not describe the philosophy and ethics of most non-religious people. The wonderful, and still missed comedian, Linda Smith was one of the many people who found out that they were Humanists when someone told her she was when she was asked to become President of the BHA.
Funerals and Memorial Services. Humanist funerals and memorials celebrate the person who has died and usually includes their lifestory and thoughts and memories from their family and friends. This is usually written up by the family/friends after talking through their loved one’s life after a visit, through phonecalls and emails.
A typical Order of Service for a funeral
Music
Introduction
Lifestory
Thoughts and Memories
Poem/Reading
Music for Reflection
The committal
Closing Words
Music as we leave
Most funerals take place at a crematorium or cemetery, but they can take place in people’s home, community venue, hotel, pub etc with immediate family going to the crematorium for the committal. I believe and hope this will happen more in the future.
It is a privilege to hear people’s interesting lifestories, to be involved in helping people celebrate their loved one’s life with a personal funeral or memorial ceremony, to be involved in their lives at a time when they are bereaved and to meet some memorable people over the years at funerals. As someone who was involved with comedy I was honoured to be asked to conduct the funeral for the wonderful Dave Allen. I do believe that humour is essential to humanist ceremonies.
Funeral Directors have the details of non-religious celebrants but some now prefer to use Civil or independent celebrants who will also do a bit of religious content so if you want a celebrant that shares your outlook or that of your loved one then do make sure you ask for a Humanist celebrant.
A memorial service in Streatham
Naming Ceremonies
The arrival of a child is a momentous occasion and should be honoured with an inclusive, participative, personal, memorable and humorous ceremony with family and friends. and with the appointment of mentors/oddparents and an introduction for the child of why their oddparents were chosen.
There are usually spoken contributions from parents, grandparents, others/children and the mentors/oddparents after an introduction by the celebrant and the formal naming of the child. Humour is important in a Humanist ceremony and often includes child centred readings/songs.
I recommend having a Nameday book for contributions from family and friends and inviting all those coming to bring along something for it so that that she/he has something to look back on and cherish in years to come, eg a poem, acrostic (using the initials of the name), quotations, piece of advice, a recipe, a brief family history, a list of their favourite things, a promise, a photo, picture etc. It is best if all contributions to the ceremony are written so that they also can be included in the Nameday book.
Naming and Wedding I used to conduct weddings, including one’s in France, Spain. Italy and Poland and I had the privilege of conducting the first Humanist same-sex partnership ceremony when they were being piloted in City Hall London in 2003. Now I conduct simple combined Naming and Wedding ceremonies. Many couples set up home, have a baby/family and want a simple, hassle- free, inexpensive ceremony and party and the two-in-one Naming and Wedding ceremony is right for them. It will include the elements of a Naming ceremony but with a Story so Far section and the reading of their own vows to each other.
I have now become an independent Humanist celebrant. I am still a committed member of HUK but found the Humanist Ceremonies network becoming too corporate and commercial especially within the weddings industry, making us franchisees etc.
I am also happy to advise people who wish to conduct their own ceremonies. My fee for conducting ceremonies is £210. Please do get in touch. Email jeanne.rathbone@gmail.com or phone 0207 228 2327
Biddy Lanchester, as she was known, and her daughter Elsa feature as two of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill Walk that I first led on Sunday 15th April.The next one will be on Sunday 10th June at 2.00 at Battersea Town Hall and is the Battersea Society’s contribution to the Wandsworth Heritage Festival.
In researching women who have been associated with Battersea I had heard about the Lanchesters from John Tilley who was a Labour councillor for St John ward in the 70s and who was a member of the Battersea Society. Edith Lanchester known as Biddy (1871-1966) was a British socialist and feminist and had lived in Este Road which is off Falcon Road. Her decision to live with her lover Shamus Sullivan became a cause celebre.
There was a meeting called by Edith’s comrades lead by Shamus under the auspices of the Legitimation League, a body set up to campaign to secure equal rights for children born outside of marriage. At the meeting, a resolution was passed against Fielding-Blandford, and Mary Gray, was urged to take legal action against her tenant’s brother for assaulting her during the raid on her home.
After a few days of lobbying by the SDF, her friends including Eleanor Marx and John Burns Battersea MP.
Edith was born in Hove, she was the fifth child of a family of eight. Her father Henry was, an established architect. Following in their father’s footsteps of bourgeois success, three of Edith’s brothers became successful in the fields of architecture and engineering. The eldest Henry was an architect and town planner was awarded a Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British architects. Brother, Frederick was a car and aircraft designer who invented the first all-British four-wheel petrol car along and with his three brothers formed the Lanchester Engine Company. George, her younger brother became chief designer. His first post-war car, the Lanchester hp 40 limousine, was considered to be ‘the finest car in the world’.
After attending the Birkbeck Institution and the Maria Grey training college, Edith first worked as a teacher and then a clerk-secretary working for a firm in the City of London. By 1895 Edith was a confirmed socialist and member of the Social Democratic Federation. The SDF had an explicitly socialist platform, was strongly opposed to the Liberal Party which then claimed to represent the labour movement in parliament. Their progressive programme, called for a 48-hour workweek, the abolition of child labour, compulsory and free and secular education, equality for women, and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange by a democratic state
Edith was teaching when she was was lodging with Mary Gray – fellow SDF member and her family in 72 Este Road. Mary was instrumental in setting up Socialist Sunday School. Mary had run a soup kitchen for the children of the dock strike. Her aim, on realising they had little or no education, was to influence and educate them and make them aware of their socialist responsibilities and provide what was lacking in their day schools. She started the first Sunday with only one other besides her own two children but twenty years later there were approximately one hundred and twenty schools throughout the country, twenty of them being in London itself
In 1895 Edith, known as Biddy, she announced that, in protest against Britain’s patriarchal marriage laws, she was going to cohabit with her lover, an Irish factory railway clerk James or Shamus Sullivan. Her socialist feminist convictions had led her to conclude that the wife’s vow to obey her husband was oppressive and she was politically opposed to the institution of marriage. Her friend Eleanor Marx similarly lived with her lover, which we would less romantically refer to as ‘partner’ nowadays. , Their “free love union” was scheduled to begin on 26 October 1895. It caused quite a storm because of the actions and antics of her family and the ensuing furore.
Incensed, Edith’s father and brothers barged into her house and forcibly subjected their daughter to an examination by Dr George Fielding-Blandford, a leading psychiatrist and author of Insanity and Its Treatment. Edith was pronounced mad at the scene and, when she physically tried to resist and fight back, was handcuffed by her father. Blandford justified his action by describing Edith’s planned action as an act of ‘social suicide. After signing emergency commitment papers under the 1890 Lunacy Act, Fielding-Blandford had Lanchester imprisoned; her own father and brothers bound her wrists and dragged her to a carriage destined for the Priory Hospital in Roehampton.
The psychiatrist explained his reasoning in a contemporary news report. Edith Lanchester “had always been eccentric, and had lately taken up with Socialists of the most advanced order. She seemed quite unable to see that the step she was about to take meant utter ruin. If she had said that she had contemplated suicide a certificate might have been signed without question. I considered I was equally justified in signing one when she expressed her determination to commit this social suicide. She is a monomaniac on the subject of marriage, and I believe her brain had been turned by Socialist meetings and writings, and that she was quite unfit to take care of herself.”The “Supposed Cause” of her insanity was recorded on the certificates as “over-education”
Almost immediately a meeting was held with the help of John Burns Battersea MP, the Commissioners of Lunacy proclaimed her sane though “foolish” and released her.
The New York Times reported that the affair had “rivet the attention of three kingdoms” and that “no penny paper had printed less than ten columns on this engrossing subject during the week”. Her SDF supporters sang The Red Flag from outside the asylum’s walls and beneath Edith’s barred window. The Marquis of Queensbury wrote to The Standard offering the couple a cheque for £100 as a wedding present if they would go through the legal marriage ceremony but under protest.
The history of the Legitimation League is fascinating. According to John Sweeney, an undercover policeman who infiltrated the organisation, the authorities feared that this ‘open and unashamed’ attack on marriage laws was the vanguard of an attack on all laws. After the national press published a letter signed by peers and clergymen urging the use of ‘the strong hand of the law’ against the free love movement.
There was interesting tensions between The Theosophy Society, Liberal and Socialist attitude to sex, sexual relations and celibacy. The Independent Labour Party Leader, Keir Hardie, for instance accused Edith of discrediting socialism. I think her stand was a brave and radical challenge by a socialist feminist to the institution of marriage and to late Victorian society’s highly conservative attitudes. Incidentally, as a Humanist celebrant I back the campaign for Civil Partnerships for all couples and not just same sex couples.
As I am always looking for Battersea connections I noted from a book on Theosophy and Feminism in England that Edith was a member of the Free Press Defence Committee alongside Charlotte Despard represent the the Theosophy Society after it was set up when Havelock Ellis’s book on homosexuality which was distributed by the league was seized and condemned as obscene at the subsequent trial. The indictment included, as evidence of obscenity, poems and articles by women; the judge was outraged by women’s active involvement with the paper, and tried to bar female spectators from the courtroom.
By the end of the 1890s marriage versus free love was a regular, if controversial, topic of debate in novels, plays and stories, newspaper articles and public meetings.
Edith and Shamus set up home in Lewisham and had two children. They lived together until his death in 1945. Edith never saw her father again.
Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986 was Biddy and Shamus’s daughter. Elsa became a famous actress. She danced at the inauguration of the Battersea Labour Party Women’s section when invited by Caroline Ganley who was asked to set it up by Charlotte Despard in Battersea Lower Town Hall.
She danced in the Lower Town Hall aged 16 for the inauguration of the Battersea Labour Party Women’ Section at the request of Caroline Ganley who was asked to establish the Women’s Section by Charlotte Despard who gave her funds to do it.
Elsa studied dance as a child and as a teenager went to Paris as a pupil of Isadora Duncan. After the first world war she began performing in theatre and cabaret, where she established her career over the following decade. She met the actor Charles Laughton in 1927, and they were married two years later. She began playing small roles in British films, including the role of Anne of Cleves with Laughton in The Private Life of Henry V111 (1933) His success in American films resulted in the couple moving to Hollywood where Elsa played small film roles.
Her role as the title character in Bride of Frankenstein(1935) brought her recognition. She played supporting roles through the 1940s and 1950s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting actress for Come to the Stable (1949) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the last of twelve films in which she appeared with Laughton. Following Laughton’s death in 1962, Lanchester resumed her career with appearances in such Disney films as Mary Poppins (1964), That Darn Cat (1965) and Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968). The horror film Willard (1971) was highly successful, and one of her last roles was in Murder by Death (1976).
She began teaching dance in the Duncan style and gave classes to children in Lewisham south London where she was brought up and earned some welcome extra income for her household.
She started the Children’s Theatre, and later the Cave of Harmony, a nightclub at which modern plays and cabaret turns were performed. She revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights. She became sufficiently famous for Columbia to invite her into the recording studio to make 78 rpm discs of four of the numbers she sang in these revues: “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” and “He Didn’t Oughter” were on one disc (recorded in 1926) and “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m Living in Sin” and “The Ladies Bar” were on the other (recorded 1930).
Her cabaret and nightclub appearances led to more serious stage work and it was in a play by Arnold Bennett called Mr Prohack (1927) that Lanchester first met another member of the cast, Charles Laughton. In 1938, Lanchester published a book about her relationship with Laughton, Charles Laughton and I. In March 1983, Lanchester released an autobiography, entitled Elsa Lanchester Herself. In the book she alleges that she and Charles never had children because Laughton was homosexual.
Elsa died in California on December 1986 aged 84, at the The Motion Picture Hospital from pneumonia having suffered from two strokes.
There is still a lot of interest in Elsa for various reasons. Her Bride of Frankenstein has given her status as a cult siren .
Believe it or not, without Elsa Lanchester, there probably would not be any Cult Sirens website. In fact, it’s not exaggeration to claim that her immortal role in Bride of Frankenstein can easily make her the ultimate Siren in history, considering that this unique character may be the ultimate female role in a horror movie. Nothing less!
Tom Blunt, a young producer and host of numerous entertainments in New York City, including a film-inspired variety show called “Meet The Lady” for the 92nd Street Y which was a show about Elsa. He He has written for sites such as The Awl and New York Magazine; his crackpot cinematic theories have been cited in The Guardian and IFC News. http://tomblunt.com/2018/03/the-bride-is-back-elsas-book-in-stores-april-1/
I contacted him about my walk Notable Women of Lavender Hill which includes Elsa because he has been instrumental in getting her autobiography reprinted by Chicago Review Press. I have promised to send him photos of us motley crew in front of the house they lived in for many years 27 Leathwaite Road.
In his article he writes about her witty and candid autobiography written long after Charles had died which now resonates with readers and LGBT commentators about their marriage.
Back then, she was the lesser half of a Hollywood power-couple, migrating from England to the US with Laughton in the early ’30s, where he became an Oscar-winning wunderkind. Elsa snapped up character roles, often in her husband’s movies, toiling in his shadow as he became further renowned as a master-thespian, teacher, and even director (“The Night of the Hunter” remains a classic). The quirkiness of their relationship was considered by fans and friends alike as proof that these two offbeat intellectuals were made for each other – but it also served as a smokescreen for the secret they ended up keeping together for over thirty years.
Even today, over thirty years later, women are finding that unless they speak up immediately, their motives in remaining silent will forever cast doubt on their honesty. Keeping silent seemingly revokes their right to complain.
In 1983, long after her husband’s death, Elsa finally broke her silence. Her memoir, Elsa Lanchester Herself, included a detailed, unflinching personal account of their arrangement, from unfortunate way she first learned of Laughton’s homosexuality (when he was busted for soliciting a male prostitute, early in their marriage) to the grief and resentment that gradually accumulated between them, fully permeating even their final moments.http://www.signature-reads.com/2018/04/elsa-lanchester-book-exposes-a-closeted-marriage/
I hope that there will be some sort of show about Elsa locally something similar to what Tom Blunt devised with readings, sketches, interviews, her song recordings and clips. I’ll see what we can do! These are photos of of my ersatz plaque commemorating Elsa and Biddy taken on a sunny day in April andthe view from the back windows of her home onto Clapham Common. Elsa and Biddy are in a queue for Battersea Society commemorative plaques. Of the 16 English Heritage plaques in Battersea there are none to women. When the Battersea Society plaque to Caroline Ganley is unveiled later this year it will be the third honouring women – still a long way to go before we have a gender balance. So, I will continue the tours and the endeavour to have these inspiring women remembered.
The next tour of Notable Women of Lavender Hill will be on Sunday 10th June 2018 at 2.00 starting at Battersea Town Hall.
Joan and I with our ersatz paque at 27 Leathwaite Road former family home of Elsa Lanchester
This is an ersatz plaque
The view from the back windows of 27 leathwaite Road Battersea overlooking Clapham Common
It is an eclectic mix of some Battersea women but they are the one’s I have chosen because they all intrigued and interested me and as ever I enjoyed the research and all the distracting lateral searches that inevitably comes with researching on the internet.
Penelope Fitzgerald 1916 – 2000 is another name I suggested to Mr Jones at Wandsworth Council for the naming of streets and apartment blocks. She was a feisty woman with wide ranging interests and definitely one I would loved to have known if I was to have conducted her funeral. Her wiki entry states she; ‘ was an English Booker Prize -winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. In 2012 , The Observer named her final novel, The The Blue Flower one of “the ten best historical novels
She was one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary British fiction. Her novels, spare, immaculate masterpieces divide into two sections; an earlier group loosely based on her own experiences, and a later group, in which she moves to other countries and periods. In 1979, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore.
She was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College, Oxford, to which she won a scholarship. Her father was son of the Bishop of Manchester, her mother the daughter Bishop of Lincoln.She married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier who she met at a wartime party, in 1941. He became an alcoholic.
In the early 1950s she and her husband lived in Hampstead. Soon afterwards Desmond was disbarred for “forging signatures on cheques that he cashed at the pub.” The end of his legal career led to a life of poverty for the Fitzgeralds; at times they were even homeless and lived for four months in a homeless centre. They lived for eleven years in a council flat. To provide for her family during the 1960s Fitzgerald taught at the Italia Conti Academy, a drama school, and at Queens Gate School where her pupils included Camilla Shand Duchess of Cornwall.)She also taught “at a posh crammer where her pupils included Anna Wintour and Helena Bonham Carter. She continued to teach until she was seventy years old. She also worked in a bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. For a time she lived in Battersea on a houseboat that sank twice and later with her daughter in Almeric Road.
She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of the artist Burne-Jones.This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a joint biography of her father and uncles in which she never mentions herself by name. Later in 1977 she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankamun mania earlier in the 1970s. The novel was written to amuse her terminally ill husband, who died in 1976.
She worked for the BBC during the war and began writing in the 1960s, although her first novel, The Golden Child, was not published until 1977. Her early fiction drew on her own life and working experiences, including a period running a bookshop, which inspired the Booker-shortlisted The Bookshop (1978); time spent living on a barge on the Thames at Battersea Reach, which she wrote about in Offshore (1979), winner of the Booker Prize; and her experiences teaching at the Italia Conti stage school in London, which gave her the material for At Freddie’s, published in 1982.
There is a great lengthy review of her http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/04/victory-penelope-fitzgerald/ written by Alan Hollingsworth ‘Just before Penelope Knox went down from Oxford with a congratulatory First in 1938, she was named a “Woman of the Year” in Isis, the student paper. She wrote a few paragraphs about her university career, dwelling solely on what had gone wrong. She’d come to Oxford expecting poets and orgies, and had seen few of the one and none of the other…..I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing.”
There would be no biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, of course, if she hadn’t done so, and it’s part of the unusual interest of her story that the promised start was deferred by nearly forty years. She published her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, when she was fifty-eight; her first novel appeared when she was sixty. She was, as she said, “an old writer who had never been a young one.”
She was what would be called a bluestocking and yet she lead the life of a woman of our time surviving the vicissitudes of family life and money worries that Battersea women like myself can identify with.
Mary Gray is another of Battersea’s notable women. She lived at 72 Este Road where her friend Biddy Lanchester was lodging when she made her announcement that she and her lover Shamus Sullivan were going to live together but not get married. This caused a furore as her father, brothers with a psychiatrist came to handcuff her and drag her to the Priory Lunatic Asylum in Roehampton. They trespassed and shoved Mary aside.
MARY GRAY joined the SDF in 1890. She had been born Mary Rogers near Wokingham in Berkshire, the daughter of a baker, in January 1854; in 1876 she married Willie Gray, a stonemason and the family moved to Battersea. I can’t find any photos of her.
Mary ran a soup kitchen for the children of the dock strike, initiated the Socialist Sunday School movement in 1892. Her aim, on realising they had little or no education, was to influence and educate them and make them aware of their socialist responsibilities and provide what was lacking in their day schools. She began teaching them about the causes and consequences of poverty. The idea caught the imagination and more than 200 Socialist Sunday Schools had been set up in the UK by 1914 and the concept became international. Socialist parents sent their children to the schools to ensure they were politically-aware.
The purpose of the Socialist Sunday Schools was to challenge religion, individualism,nationalism, militarism prevalent in mainstream education help in supplanting capitalist social and economic relations with a more equitable and cooperative form, namely, socialism.
The “Socialist Catechism” Q. What is our object? A. Our object is to realise socialism. Q. What is meant by socialism? A. Socialism means common ownership and control of those things we all need to live happily and well. Q. On what principles does Socialism rest? A. Socialism rests on the great principles of love, justice and truth. Q. How can we apply these principles? A. Through cultivating the spirit of service to others and the practice of mutual aid, we can apply these great principles and so hasten the advent of socialism. http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/sunday-sermon-teach-your-children-well.html
The Socialist Sunday School movement brought brightness and comradeship into the lives of thousands of young people and adults in the drab towns and cities of early twentieth century Britain. Besides their Sunday meetings, schools ran festivals of music and dancing. They took children for rambles and camping expeditions in the countryside.The highlight of their year was May Day, when they joined the rest of the Labour movement in mammoth processions for peace and workers’ international solidarity.
She became a very active member of the SDF. In 1895 she stood as an SDF candidate, and was elected, as a member of the Battersea Board of Poor Law Guardians. She was a speaker and lecturer for them, and not just in London. A handbill advertising two meetings by her in Coventry in November 1896, one on “Socialism, The Only Hope of the Worker” and the other on “The Economic Position of Women”. There is also a press cutting from an Ilkeston paper of an outdoor meeting she addressed in the market square there in July 1897 on “Society As It Is”. For a time she was on the Executive Committee of the SDF.
She was interested in what was then called “The Woman Question”, not just votes for women but also the economic position of women generally under capitalism. She was an active suffragette as a member of the Battersea Women’s Socialist Circle.She was on friendly terms with two other prominent women members of the SDF, Marx’s daughter Eleanor and Edith Lanchester.
Another feisty Battersea women to celebrate and remember – a reminder of how radical the place was before it became gentrified with forty years of Tory rule in Thatchers favourite Borough.
DEACONESS ISABELLA GILMORE is another of Battersea’s notable women and was included in my talk on International Women’s Day at St Mary’s Church for the Battersea Society’s contribution of Vote 100 centenary of Votes for Women and featured in my walk Notable Women of Lavender Hill on Sunday 15th April. The next one will be on 10th June at 2.00 at Battersea Town Hall https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/notable-women-of-lavender-hill/
Gilmore House, on the corner of Elspeth Road, facing Clapham Common is where the deaconate she established was based. It is now private apartments – very much a sign of the times! She is another of those strong Victorian widows yet her biography was tagged with ‘Sister of William Morris’. She is also on my list of worthy candidates for a Battersea Society blue plaque. There are 16 English heritage plaques in Battersea but none celebrating women. I am on a mission to promote all these inspiring women with Battersea connections.
Isabella Gilmore (née Morris; 1842–1923) was an English church woman who oversaw the revival of the Deaconess Order in the Church of England. She served actively in the poorest parishes in South London for almost two decades and she is remembered with a commemoration in the Calendar of Saints.
Isabella Gilmore was born in London in 1842. She had a happy marriage to a naval officer, Arthur Gilmore. She was widowed at the age of 40. Childless, she began training as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. Two years later in 1884, she took on as her own eight orphaned nieces and nephews from her late brother Randall.
In 1886, she was recruited by the Bishop of Rochester, to revive the female deaconatein his diocese. Her initial reluctance, based on her lack of theological training and her lack of knowledge of the Deaconess Order, was worn down by the bishop. Gilmore and the Bishop of Rochester proceeded to plan for an Order of Deaconesses for the C of E where the women were to be “a curiously effective combination of nurse, social worker and amateur policemen”.
Isabella should be remembered for her own deeds and not be tagged to her brother William but this was written in the early sixties!
In 1887, she was ordained a deaconess and a training house for other woman was put in place in Battersea along Clapham Common later to be named Gilmore House in her honour.
I love the way she acquired and held on to the house which is so familiar to me as see it as I week on the common a few days a week. She described seeing The Sisters being emptied of its furniture and put up for sale in the summer of 1891 as she walked across the common, following the death of the Rev. Henry Ralph, its last private occupant. Discovering that it had been bought by Thomas Wallis, who lived at Sister House, she persuaded him to let the building to her personally for the new institution, the diocesan council then becoming her sub-tenants. After some redecoration and conversion, the deaconesses moved to The Sisters from Park Hill on 19 November 1891. At the official opening a fortnight later a new chapel was dedicated in one of the rooms. When Wallis died, Mrs Gilmore was again fortunate that, before the new owner, John Wilson, could buy up her lease and throw her out, Herbert Shepherd-Cross took the house off Wilson’s hands. An old acquaintance, he sold Mrs Gilmore the freehold for around £4,000, even contributing £100 towards the purchase fund.
Most left after a shorter or longer time as the job proved too challenging. It must certainly have been a shock for many of them to learn that the idea was not to reside in splendour and dish out alms to the poor, but that ‘real’ work had to be done. Gilmore insisted that the women were trained in the basic theological principles in order to be ready for parochial duties. They were also trained in basic nursing skills and some were given the opportunity to train for six months at Guy’s hospital. The strict discipline weeded out the unsuitable candidates quite quickly and after a couple of years, the house was full of dedicated professionals. They provided a soup kitchen, donated clothing, looked after the sick, taught religion and basic sanitation. One of Isabella’s more odious duties was fundraising. She disliked it, but was very good at it and in 1891, the institution could move to a larger house on the north side of Clapham Common called “The Sisters”, but later named “Gilmore House”.
In 1894, Isabella’s mother died and left her a substantial sum which she decided to use on a chapel for the Institution. Philip Webb designed a simple chapel in the arts and crafts style, as well as the furniture and a cross for the chapel. This was a rare ecclesiastical work by Philip Webb, personally funded by Mrs Gilmore, and of exceptional interest for its innovative late Arts and Crafts architecture and the high quality of its fittings, mostly designed by Webb or Morris & Co. Though the chapel survives, unfortunately it was stripped of most of its furniture in the197 0s for use as a recreation hall for students residing at Gilmore House, and more recently was converted to a studio apartment (with a flat below) as part of the 2007–8 redevelopment scheme. I am sure Isabella would be disappointed and disgusted at what happened to Gilmore House.
In 1895, Katherine Beynon came to the Institution to discuss the possibility of sending deaconesses to Lahore where her father, grandfather and great-uncle had played a major part in India’s administration. Katherine ended up doing the training herself and after a year went back to set up a similar, very successful, centre in Lahore, St. Hilda’s.
In 1906, Isabella retired from the Rochester Institution, not because she was tired of the work, but because she thought a younger person might benefit the organisation. She went to live in Upper West Street in Reigate with her niece Ada Morris, but retirement did not mean she no longer kept in touch with her work or her former pupils. She corresponded with deaconesses she had trained all over the world and could always be called upon in a difficult situation. In 1914, the two nieces moved to Kew and gradually Isabella was less and less capable of active involvement in church work and she retired from her diocesan post. She died on 15 March 1823 and was buried on the 21st at St. Michael’s, Lyme Regis, beside her husband. The bas-relief in Southwark cathedral was set up the following year.
She had personally trained at least seven other head deaconesses for other dioceses before she died in 1923. At her memorial service, the Archbishop of Canterbury, foretold, “Some day, those who know best will be able to trace much of the origin and root of the revival of the Deaconess Order to the life, work, example and words of Isabella Gilmore. For this let us give thanks: I feel sure it is most meet and right so to do.”
She served under three bishops who fortunately were supportive though she was trepidatious every time a new one was installed. In the Anglican History site it says: He (Thorrold) was happy in discovering and calling to his aid one whose powers, mental and physical, had been tested and developed by the strenuous life of a nurse in one of the great London hospitals, a woman of high intellect and strong will, with the rare gifts of sympathy with the souls of the very poor, and of courage to face the misery into which their misfortune or their faults had depressed them.
Deaconess Florence Glossop, Head Deaconess of Lucknow, who finished her training in 1892, writes of Deaconess Gilmore that:”She was a most capable woman, abounding in zeal and devotion for her work amongst the poorest, most ignorant and miserable people in the slums of South London. She never spared herself, and certainly her love for the sick and for children won them to seek the things which are above. Few, if any, of those who worked under her, failed to be inspired by her whole-hearted devotion to our Lord and to His service. Her keen sense of fun and real enjoyment of all the experiences that came to her and to us brought plenty of life and brightness into the House. There was never anything narrow or ‘goody-goody’ about her, and she had boundless sympathy, except for any who seemed to her to shirk exertion of mind or body.”
Another of her students, Deaconess Alice Haslam, writes from Tai-an-Fu, North China, to say that: “Her rule over the students was strict, and she had little mercy on any slovenliness or unpunctuality; but she kept us happy and busy and well. In real illness or trouble no one could be more understanding and sympathetic. She was beloved by the Battersea women. There was one woman I remember especially, who was sore and hard because her child had died. Deaconess Gilmore helped to prepare the little body for burial, and as she put it into the coffin she restored a beloved dolly to its place in the child’s arms. Somehow that act softened the poor hard heart, and the woman realised something of the meaning of love.”
As a citizen she was a socialist of the true type. On one occasion her brother, William Morris, said to her, “I preach socialism, you practise it,” and her life proves that she devoted not only her worldly possessions but her heart and service to the furtherance of the good of her neighbour rather than her own.
I think we should have a Battersea Society blue plaque on Gilmore House commemorating Isabella. There is one to but not commemorating Isabella after whom it is now named. The plaque on the house is to John Walter, coal buyer and member of Lloyds who lived there 1774-1782 which was erected in 1977 who had to leave the house when he became bankrupt. He later found fame and success as founder of The Times newspaper which is why he commemorated.
Here is my plaque commemorating Deaconess Isabella Gilmore while we await the real McCoy! Battersea has 16 English heritage blue plaques known of which commemorate women. So, there is a queue of women who should be commemorated by the Battersea Society till we reach a level playing field.
Charlotte Despard is a name somewhat revered in left wing circles in Battersea as well as nationally and internationally because of the many causes she espoused and her influence. Yet Tory Wandsworth Council didn’t even mention her for their February 6th announcement on the centenary of the Representation of the People Act!
Charlotte Despard 1944-1939 led a fascinating life that can be divided into stages. There was her Battersea socialist-activist phase which coincided with her suffragette era and overlapped with her Irish independence phase. Her final phase was when she relocated Belfast. Her ascetic vegetarian outlook, her anti-vivisection campaigning, her ant-fascist activism, her confused ‘spiritual’ side from Church of England protestant, converting to Catholicism and being active in the Theosophist movement overlapped with all of these.
Her biography by Andro Linklater was published in 1980. An unhusbanded life: Charlotte Despard : suffragette, socialist, and Sinn Feiner. Hutchinson
‘An unhusbanded life’ would probably not have been a title chosen by a female biographer although it is interesting in the context of female suffrage organisations leaders. This was noted by her biographer Margaret Mulvihill
I am writing this blog because of our local campaign to have a statue commissioned to commemorate Charlotte in Battersea in Nine Elms. Of the other two suffragette widowed leaders Emmeline Pankhurst has a statue in Victoria Gardens since 1930 and Millicent Garrett Fawcett is due to have one unveiled in Parliament Square this year 2018 – the centenary year of Votes for Women. This will be the first statue there commemorating a woman and by a woman sculptor Gillian Wearing.
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This idea to have a statue has been mooted since the regeneration of Nine Elms area has begun as this where she lived and had her club and welfare facilities when she came here to live when she was widowed in 1890.
I wrote to Anne Mullins who is Head of Culture Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership two years ago with the suggestion of a statue to commemorate Nine Elms esteemed previous resident as her brief is to coordinate cultural activities in the area but as a council officer she is still looking into it!
In January 2018 I contacted the US Embassy and Ballymore Group, the developers of Embassy Gardens, which was the site of Charlottes home/club in Currie Street with the suggestion of a commemorative statue there in this centenary year. I was curious to see how the US Embassy would say no and noted that Sherri signed of respectfully. It must be American diplomatic speak.
“While we thank you very much for your recommendation that we erect a statue in honor of Charlotte Despard on the embassy grounds, we are currently in the process of installing major art pieces that were selected by the U.S. Department of State specifically for our new embassy. There are no plans currently to add to this collection. However, we will certainly pass along your suggestion to our Art in Embassies colleagues back in Washington for their information.
I hope you were able to follow the link I sent along yesterday acknowledging Charlotte Despard on our social media feed. We really are thrilled to be in the neighborhood and looking forward to getting to know our new neighbors.
I think Charlotte stands out prominently of the three widow suffrage leaders for being a socialist and a Sinn Feiner – a maverick to the establishment which might explain why she hasn’t been championed for commemoration.
This blog piece from The Charlotte Despard Pub in Archway is a good precis mainly gleaned from Margaret Mulvihill’s biography of Charlotte and the article contrasting Charlotte and her brother John is illuminating.
Charlotte French, the daughter of William French, a naval commander from Ireland was born in Ripple Kent in 1844. By the age of ten her father had died and her mother was committed to an insane asylum and she was sent to London to live with relatives.
She had a conventional education but she recalled trying to run a way. “After that, lest I should infect my sisters with my spirit of insubordination, I was kept in solitary confinement for three or four days, and then sent away to school.”
For several years she toured the continent with her unmarried sisters. Charlotte met Maximilian Despard, an Anglo-Irish businessman who had made a fortune in the Far East and was a founder of what became the HSBC. The couple married on 20th December 1870. Like his new wife he favoured Home Rule for Ireland, rights and careers for women and many other progressive causes of the day. Together they traveled widely, going to India several times but always returning to their spacious country home, Courtlands, in Surrey, which stood amid 15 rolling acres of woods, lawn, stream and formal gardens. With her husband’s encouragement, she published her first novel, Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow in 1874. During the next sixteen years Charlotte wrote ten novels, mostly romances but A Voice from the Dim Millions dealt with the problems of a poor young factory worker. Tellingly she was unable to find a publisher for this novel.
Her other novels were Wandering Fires, A Modern Iago, Jonas Sylvester, The Rajah’s Heir and Outlawed
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When her husband died in 1890, Charlotte decided to dedicate the rest of her life to helping the poor. She left her luxurious house in Esher and moved to Nine Elms having been introduced to it by her neighbour Lady Albany and her flower mission. She lived among he people she intended to assist.
She bought 95 Wandsworth Road first then 2 Currie Street. There she funded and staffed a health clinic, as well as organizing youth and working men’s clubs, and a soup kitchen for the local unemployed. She lived among the local community during the week. She converted to Catholicism as she very much identified with the large Irish community living in the area. At the end of 1894 she was elected as a guardian for the Vauxhall board of the Lambeth poor-law union. She proved herself a brilliant committee woman, bringing a rare combination of informed compassion, practical experience, and military efficiency to the board’s deliberations.
Charlotte became friends with George Lansbury and for the next few years became involved in the campaign to reform the Poor Law system.
Charlotte became friends with George Lansbury and for the next few years became involved in the campaign to reform the Poor Law system.
She joined the Social Democratic Federation and later the Independent Labour Party and got to know Margaret Bondfield, the trade union leader and Keir Hardie, the new leader of the Labour Party.
Charlotte, known as Lottie to her family, became a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies which was spearheaded by Millicent Fawcett but in 1906, frustrated by the NUWSS lack of success,she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU),which had been established by Emmeline Pankhurst and her three daughters. The main objective was to gain, not universal suffrage, the vote for all women and men over a certain age, but votes for women, “on the same basis as men.” This meant winning the vote not for all women but for only the small stratum of women who could meet the property qualification. As one critic pointed out, it was “not votes for women”, but “votes for ladies.”
She later wrote: “I had sought and found comradeship of some sort with men. I had marched with great processions of the unemployed. I had stood on the platforms of Labour men and Socialists. I had tried to stir up the people to a sense of shame about the misery of their homes, and the degradation of their women and children. I had listened with sympathy to fiery denunciations of Governments and the Capitalist systems to which they belong. Amongst all these experiences, I had not found what I met on the threshold of this young, vigorous Union of Hearts.”
On 23rd October, 1906, Charlotte was arrested with Mary Gawthorpe during a protest meeting at the House of Commons….” but in the twinkling of an eye dozens of policemen sprang forward, tore the tiny creature (Mary) from her post and swiftly rushed her out of the Lobby. Instantly Mrs. Despard stepped into the breach; but she also was roughly dragged away.”
In 1907 she was imprisoned twice in Holloway Prison. However, like other leading members of the WSPU she began to question the leadership of Mrs Pankhurst. Some women objected to the way that the Pankhursts were making decisions without consulting members. They also felt that a small group of wealthy women were having too much influence over the organisation.
This a photo of her that was given to me by a family when I visited them whilst organising a funeral. They didn’t know who she was and asked if I wanted it.
In a conference in 1907, Mrs Pankhurst told members that she intended to run the WSPU without interference. “She called upon those who had faith in her leadership to follow her, and to devote themselves to the sole end of winning the vote. This announcement was met with a dignified protest from Mrs. Despard as Pankhurst challenged all who did not accept the leadership of herself and her daughter to resign from the Union that she had founded, and to form an organisation of their own.”
As a result of this speech, Charlotte and seventy other members of the WSPU left to form the Womens Freedom League. (WFL). Like the WSPU, the WFL was a militant organisation that was willing the break the law. As a result, over 100 of their members were sent to prison after being arrested on demonstrations or refusing to pay taxes. However, the WFL was a completely non-violent organisation and opposed the WSPU but did break the law which it deemed unjust. It was especially critical of the WSPU arson campaign. Charlotte was scathing about the WSPU. Elizabeth Elmy a strong-willed suffragist said Charlotte was ‘ rude and rough’ towards her for being a member of the WSPU.
Charlotte also spent a great deal of time in Ireland and in 1908 she joined with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins to form the Irish Women’s Franchise League In 1909 she met a young besuited lawyer named Gandhi and they discussed the theory of “passive resistance”. As the leading figure of the WFL. Despard urged members not to pay taxes and to boycott the 1911 Census. Despard financially supported the locked-out workers during the labour dispute in Dublin and also helped establish the Irish Workers’ College in the city.
The WFL grew rapidly, and soon had sixty branches throughout Britain with an overall membership of about 4,000 people. The WFL also established its own newspaper, The Vote. Teresa Billington-Greig and Charlotte were both talented writers and were the main people responsible for producing the newspaper.
Battersea Labour Luminaries
Annie Kenney later wrote that the recruiting campaign by the Pankhurts among the men in the country was deemed autocratic and not understood or appreciated by many of our members (of theWSPU). They were quite prepared to receive instructions about the Vote, but they were not going to be told what they were to do in a world war.”
Charlotte like most members of the WFL were pacifists and so during the the war she refused to become involved in the British Army’s recruitment campaign.
Ironically, her brother, General John French, was Chief of Staff of the British Army and commander of the British Expeditionary forces sent to Europe in August 1914. Her sister, Catherine Harley, was also a supporter of the war and served in the Scottish Women’s Hospital in France. Charlotte argued that the British government was not doing enough to bring an end to the war and supported the campaign of the Women’s Peace Council for a negotiated peace.
After the passing of the Representation of the People’s Act and the Qualification of Women Act in 1918, Charlotte became the Battersea Labour Party candidate (which she financially helped) in the general election called immediately after the war in December as John Burns MP refused to join the Labour Party as he had joined the Liberals by then. (Caroline Ganley had to call to house twice to see if he was going to stand again as a Labour candidate). Charlotte had no time for Burns who ‘had waved the red flag but now played the boss’s tune’ She said at a meeting in Battersea District Library that she hoped that if no other Liberal was thrown However, in the euphoria of Britain’s victory, Despard’s anti-war views were very unpopular and like all the other pacifists candidates, who stood in the election, she was defeated.
Charlotte then left Battersea for Ireland. Mulvihill argued: “Among the suffragette leaders she had stood out as a supporter of Irish home rule, and when that movement gave way to the struggle for complete independence she became an active supporter of the British solidarity organization the Irish Self Determination League. Her sympathy for the Irish republican movement brought her into direct conflict with her brother, who in 1918 had been sworn in as lord lieutenant of Ireland. While he set about crushing the rebels, his sister was supporting them.”
In 1920 Despard toured Ireland as a member of the Labour Party Commission of Inquiry with Maud Gonne with who she shared a house in Dublin. They also formed the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League to support republican prisoners. In the 1920s Charlotte Despard became involved in the Sinn Fein campaign for a united Ireland.
In 1930 she and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington made a tour of the Soviet Union. Impressed with what she saw she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. and became secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia. She then relocated to Belfast and continued traveling to Britain for her annual birthday bash given by the WFL as well as attending international conferences and rallies. She wanted to go to Spain but ill health prevented her. She was looked after by republicans Jack Mulvenna and Mollie Fitzgerald. She died on 10th November 1939, after a fall in her new house in Whitehead but her funeral was in Dublin and she was buried in Glasnevin cemetery with a tribute from Maud Gonne and Hanna amongst others.
Her gravestone bears the inscription
She tried to do her duty
“I slept and dreamt that life was Beauty,
I woke and found that Life was Duty.’
There is a mural in Battersea by Brian Barnes which features Charlotte next to Hilda Hewlett first British female licensed pilot.
The image of her on the Charlotte Despard pub in N19 is of her before she married whereas she always wore her mantilla in her widowed politically active years. So, not really very representative of her.
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The campaign to have her commemorated by statue in Nine Elms will continue as this the most obvious place to have it placed and paid for by the wealthy developers of Nine Elms with the support of Wandsworth Council to celebrate one of Battersea’s socialist heroines and suffragette campaigner.
Posted in Battersea women by sheelanagigcomedienne on November 10, 2017
Gareth Jones Wandsworth Borough Council is responsible for coming up with suggestions for street and block names for new developments in the Borough. He has asked me for more suggestions for the names of women of repute connected to Battersea for the Bellway development around Ponton Road Nine Elms I sent him a further list and brief biographies of women associated with Battersea.
He has confirmed that they have selected the name Lanchester Way which is close to the US Embassy.
Charlotte, Caroline and Hilda already had streets/blocks named after them. Gareth picked up on two further names of men associated with Battersea that I had suggested Brogan and Mansbridge.
Charlotte, Hilda and Evelyn feature in Brian Barnes’ Mural Battersea in Perspective.
The Battersea Society was successful in getting one of our blue plaques to commemorate Hilda Hewlett on Vardens Road but sadly unsuccessful in getting permission to commemorate Pamela Hansford Johnson on 53 Battersea Rise or one to honour Ida and Louise Cook at 24 Morella Road, their home for 60 years. I am delighted to hear that they will be the subject of a feature film.
Here are the further names that I have passed on to Mr. Jones.
Edith and Elsa Lanchester, mother and daughter.Edith 1871-1966 was a socialist feminist member of the Social Democraric Federation whose announcement that she was going to live with her lover Shamus Sullivan a clerk became a cause celebre.
Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986, lived in Leathwaite Road Battersea trained with dancer Isadora Duncan, ran a theatre and a cabaret club , acted on stage in BritainNand films and married actor Charles laughon and went on to have a Holywood film careerr
Mary Gray, https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/mary-gray-founder-of-socialist-sunday-schools/ lived at 72 Este Road member of the SDF and friend of Biddy Lanchester was the founder of the Socialist Sunday school movement which she started in Battersea
Mary Tealby, founder of the Battersea Cats and Dogs home.
Evelyn De Morgan,artist
Wilhelmina Stirling, of Battersea House who founded the De Morgan Collection of her sister Evelyn’s work and brother-in-law William ceramicist author.
Deaconess Isabella Gilmore who revived the deaconate order after she was widowed which she established at Gilmore House Elspeth Road.
Edith and Elsa Lanchester – Edith was a socialist and feminist, secretary to Eleanor Marx and who became a cause célèbre for living with her lover Seamus Sullivan as they eschewed marriage and her daughter Elsa who started out as a dancer, as a Holywood actress became the definitive Bride of Frankenstein and married the actor Charles Laughton.
Edith aka Biddy Lanchester
Elsa Lanchester daughter of Biddy
Mary Graey – founder of the Socialist Sunday School movement and was Edith Lanchester’s landlady.
Mary Tealby founder of Battersea Cats and Dogs Home and supporter of the RSPCA.
Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite artist.
Mrs Wilhelmina Stirling prolific author, sister of Evelyn. She lived in Battersea House and was custodian of the De Morgan Collection there as Evelyn, artist was her sister William ceramicist and author her brother-in-law.. and .
Penelope Fitzgerald author who wrote the Booker Prize with he novel Offshore in 1979 inspired by her experience of living on a houseboat at Battersea reach.
novelist and biographer was one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary British fiction. Her novels, spare, immaculate masterpieces divide into two sections; an earlier group loosely based on her own experiences, and a later group, in which she moves to other countries and periods. In 1979, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore.
MARY TEALBY 1802-1865
Mary was the founder of the Battersea Dogs Home and supporter of the RSPCA. Mary was living in Holloway, London and the Islington Gazette reported her view, having found so many starving dogs in that district alone, that ‘the aggregate amount of suffering amongst those faithful creatures throughout London must be very dreadful indeed’. Although more dogs became treasured members of families, stray and lost dogs were still suffering on the streets, with no one looking out for them. Spurred by the death of a dog she tried to nurse back to health she started a canine asylum housed in a stable in 1860.Concerned with the fate of dogs dying ‘of lingering starvation’ in the streets she established premises in St James’s Road, Holloway, where lost dogs could be retrieved by their owners. As the rules made clear the home was to be neither a permanent home for ‘old, worn out favourites’ nor a hospital, but a ‘temporary refuge to which humane persons may send only those lost dogs so constantly seen in the streets’.
The first meeting of the committee running the home was held on 27 November 1860 at the premises of the RSPCA in Pall Mall, with Mary Tealby in the chair. Tealby was not a wealthy woman and much of the committee’s early work focused on essential fund-raising. By 1861 she had become a life governor of the home.
She initially formed a group of like-minded individuals and with the help of her brother Rev Edward Bates, a retired clergyman, found a mews stable between the Caledonian and Holloway Roads and used it as her ‘temporary home for lost and starving dogs’. However, her enthusiasm for helping stray animals did not curry much favour with Victorian society whose moral concerns were waking up to the plight of the city’s many poor, considered to be a far more important issue than the fate of ‘dumb and unwanted’ animals. It was author Charles Dickens, one of these social champions and also a celebrated journalist, who helped turn public opinion in Mary’s favour. In 1862 he wrote an article for a magazine entitled All the Year Round in support of the home. Two Dog Shows played on the notion of the peculiar British love of animals and praised Mary’s initiative, comparing it with the forerunner of Crufts Dog Show. Such was Dicken’s standing in Victorian society at that time that public opinion began to turn. The home acquired Royal patronage through Queen Victoria – Queen Elizabeth is its patron today.
At the time, Mary and Edward’s cousin Mrs Robert Weale lived with her husband at The Elms in Biggleswade (now demolished). It was a large Victorian House in extensive grounds at the corner of Dells Lane and London Road. Robert Weale was a poor law inspector and by all accounts they lived a comfortable life with five servants and two gardeners. By this time Mary was ill with cancer and came to Biggleswade to live at The Elms. She died in 1865 so did not survive to see the home’s move to its now famous location in Battersea in 1871. Her grave can be found in a secluded corner of the churchyard behind the Chapter House and is inscribed ‘Mary Tealby, widow born December 30th 1801 – Died October 3rd 1865’.
The Queen unveiled the plaque on the Mary Tealby Kennels and paddocks which are for for the new dogs experiencing their first few days at in the dogs home.
The new, world-class facilities are designed to minimise stress and infection and introduce a calming environment. These redesigned kennels help keep noise and anxiety levels to a minimum, have underfloor heating, lots of light, air and space and an outside run for each dog.
The home was also roundly mocked by elements of the press. The Times launched a scathing attack on 18 October 1860. While praising advances in animal welfare, it scorned the home as a step too far: “From the sublime to the ridiculous – from the reasonable inspirations of humanity to the fantastic exhibitions of ridiculous sentimentalism – there is but a single step… When we hear of a ‘Home for Dogs’, we venture to doubt if the originators and supporters of such an institution have not taken leave of their sober senses.”
She died on 3 October 1865 in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, aged sixty-three. She and her brother were buried in the same grave in the churchyard of St Andrew’s, Biggleswade. The dogs’ home committee recorded their loss, declaring Mary Tealby to be a ‘kind-hearted and generous lady’.
In her will, she left everything to her brother. Edward Bates was the first treasurer of Battersea Dogs Home and is buried in the same grave. He died in 1876 aged 72.
Battersea Dogs Home began to take in stray cats in 1883. In 1898, a country site was opened in Surrey due to a rabies epidemic in London. It was notably used to house 100 sledge dogs in preparation for Ernest Shackleton’s second Antarctic expedition in 1914. The site closed in 1934. Today, the home’s philosopy is never to turn away a cat or dog in need. It not only takes care of strays, but reunites lost pets with their owners, provides animal training and a public advice line. At least 10,000 animals pass through its doors every year. Something Mary would no doubt be very proud of.
The animal rights campaigner, who lived in Victoria Road (now Chillingworth Road), Holloway, came top of a public poll to decide which former Islington resident most deserved a plaque in their honour.On Friday last week the plaque was unveiled at Freightliners Farm in Sheringham Road, close to the original site of the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs in Hollingsworth Street. Following Mrs Tealby’s death, the shelter was moved in 1871 to Battersea and renamed. Islington’s former mayor Barry Edwards, who nominated her for the plaque, said: “My personal interest is local history – and when I was reading up about this area and found out Mary set up the original site here, I was really excited. It made me think she really was worthy of being nominated for one of the council’s plaques.”
Today, one of the only fields where women hold a a higher percentage of executive roles than men and dominate by sheer numbers is in animal welfare. Female legislators are also more likely support animal protection legislation, making women true allies of dogs on every front. Mary Tealby was a pioneer in animal welfare and challenging male cruelty to animals for gain as hunters, poachers and entertainment or sheer cruelty.
EVELYN PICKERING DE MORGAN
Evelyn Pickering was born in London the daughter of upper-middle class parents and the niece of Rodham Spencer Stanhope was a painter within the circle of later Pre-Raphaelites who took their inspiration from the more romantic paintings of Rosetti and Burne-Jones.
Evelyn aged 10
Her early ambition to paint was discouraged by her parents but later she was permitted to become a student at the Slade School and in due course to study in Italy, in Rome and in Florence. As a young woman she exhibited Ariadne in Naxos at the first Exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877.
Her mature style, which is distinguished by a precision of detail and a fondness for mythological subjects, was derived in part from her first artistic mentor, Roddam Spencer- Stanhope, with whom she frequently painted and visited with following his permanent departure for Tuscany in 1880. She was also profoundly influenced by Edward Burne-Jones who was a close friend. Her painting was admired by a circle of fellow-artists. William Blake Richmond said of her: ‘Her industry was astonishing, and the amount which she achieved was surprising, especially considering the infinite care with which she studied every detail . . . ” George Frederic Watts pronounced her ‘the first woman-artist of the day — if not of all time. Evelyn Pickering married the potter William De Morgan in 1887 and lived with him in London until his death in 1917. She died two years later.
Her style is distinctive in its rich use of colour, allegory and the dominance of the female form. Her favourite model, Jane Hales, was once her sister’s nursemaid. She is the prototype for most of Evelyn’s women. These contrast noticeably with the women painted by male Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as those by Edward Burne-Jones, who seem to be ephemeral, dreamlike constructions in danger of wilting away. Instead, Evelyn De Morgan presents strong, athletic women, who are beautiful but robust. Jane Hales features as a model in a number of the De Morgan Collection’s paintings, including Flora, Lux in Tenebris and The Dryad.
n the 1880s with the onset of the Boer War, and later in World War I in 1914, De Morgan used her art to express the fears shared by many about the effects and horrors of war. In paintings such as SOSshe combines an anti-war message with her spiritualist beliefs. Here, a lone figure stands on a rocky outcrop in the ocean, beset on all sides by mythological beasts. This can be read as dismay at the encroaching war, and also in terms of De Morgan’s spiritualist belief in the redemptive figure of the female, as a symbol of optimism.
Her sister Wilhelmina Stirling started the De Morgan collection which was housed at Battersea House for 30 years before moving to the De Morgan Centre at East Hill library Wandsworth which was a very suitable setting and it was such a shame that Wandsworth Council closed the library and the De Morgan Centre.
MRS WILHELMINA STERLING
was born in London in 1865, Anna Maria Diana Wilhelmina Pickering was the youngest daughter of Anna Maria Wilhelmina Spencer-Stanhope and her husband, Percival Andree Pickering, Q.C. (1810-1876). She was the younger sister of Evelyn De Morgan. Over her lifetime Mrs Stirling assembled a substantial art collection that featured their work. When she died at the age of ninety-nine in 1965, she bequeathed her collection to be looked after in Trust for perpetuity.
Mrs Stirling was an accomplished and prolific writer. Her most well-known work is her biography William De Morgan and his Wife (1922) which is the starting point for all researchers interested in the De Morgans today. Her other books deal with various subjects such as spiritualism and the lives and reminiscences of the British landed gentry.
I thoroughly enjoyed he book The Merry Wives of Battersea which featured the women who lived in thew Battersea Manor house over the centuries.
Mrs Stirling also shared the progressive political ideals of many members of the Arts and Crafts movement. A letter from Emmeline Pankhurst in the archives of the De Morgan Foundation) to Mrs Stirling, written in May 1911, says
“We all feel very grateful to you for having unearthed and published such a valuable piece of evidence that women voted prior to the Reform Bill of 1832. Your help and interest lead me to think that perhaps you may some day ere long find time to come here and see something of our great organization. I am sure that you will be pleased to see what progress is being made not only in the getting of the vote but in the work of preparing women to use it wisely when it is won. I am very truly yours, E. Pankhurst”
In 1931 Wilhelmina and her husband Charles Goodbarne Stirling moved into Old Battersea House, which had been threatened with demolition by the local council. After a campaign to save the house, which was the finest example of seventeenth century domestic architecture in Battersea, the Stirlings were granted a life tenancy. They used the house to display their collection of paintings and pottery by Wilhelmina’s sister Evelyn and her husband William De Morgan. Mrs Stirling loved giving tours of the house, during which she would talk for hours on the artwork she exhibited and tell anecdotal stories regarding the house itself.
In 1961, at the age of ninety-six, Mrs Stirling was featured in a short film made by the director Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor television series. In the 17-minute long black and white film Old Battersea House, Mrs Stirling takes the visitor on a tour of the house and talks passionately about her support of the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. While her manservant, Mr Peters, carries around a large lamp to illuminate the dark corners of the house, she tells stories about the alleged sightings of ghosts and a toad who modelled for the devil in one of her sister’s paintings. The programme gives tantalizing glimpses of both Mrs Stirling’s eccentric character and the wonderful possessions with which she surrounded herself.
I visited Battersea House just before it was sold to Forbes. and I have spoken to Battersea people who remember her and have said what a wonderful character she was.
Battersea House was”a living museum,” says Claire Longworth, curator at the De Morgan Centre. “Old Battersea House was continually full of friends and family who joined her for afternoon tea, or the visitors who regularly knocked on the door hoping for a tour of the house and collection.”
Mrs Stirling lived in Old Battersea House for over 30 years. Her tours of the house could last as long as five hours and she continued to welcome visitors to her home well into her later years.
The Adventures of Prince Almero (1890, as A. M. D. Wilhelmina Pickering) Queen of the Goblins (1892, as A. M. D. Wilhelmina Pickering) A Life Awry (1893, as “Percival” Pickering)
A Pliable Marriage (1895, as “Percival” Pickering)
The Spirit is Willing (1898, as “Percival” Pickering)
Toy-Gods (1904, as “Percival” Pickering)
Annals of a Yorkshire House, from the Papers of a Macaroni & His Kindred (1911)
Coke of Norfolk and His Friends: The Life of Thomas William Coke, First Earl of Leicester of Holkham (1912)
The Merry Wives of Battersea and Gossip of Three Centuries (1956)
Ghosts Vivisected: An Impartial Inquiry into Their Manners, Habits, Mentality, Motives and Physical Construction (1957/58)
A Scrapheap of Memories (1960)
Mrs Stirling died in August 1965, just a few days before her one hundredth birthday.
Edith and Elsa Lanchester, mother and daughter who lived in Leathwaite Road SW11
In researching women who have been associated with Battersea I had heard about the Lanchesters from John Tilley who was a Labour councillor for St John ward in the 70s and who was a member of the Battersea Society. Edith Lanchester known as Biddy (1871-1966) was a British socialist and feminist and had lived in Este Road which is off Falcon Road. Her decision to live with her lover Shamus Sullivan became a cause celebre.
called by Edith’s comrades lead by Shamus under the auspices of the Legitimation League, a body set up to campaign to secure equal rights for children born outside of marriage. At the meeting, a resolution was passed against Fielding-Blandford, and Mary Gray, was urged to take legal action against her tenant’s brother for assaulting her during the raid on her home.
After a few days of lobbying by the SDF, her friends including Eleanor Marx w
Edith was born in Hove, she was the fifth child of a family of eight. Her father Henry was, an established architect. Following in their father’s footsteps of bourgeois success, three of Edith’s brothers became successful in the fields of architecture and engineering. The eldest Henry was an architect and town planner was awarded a Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British architects. Brother, Frederick was a car and aircraft designer who invented the first all-British four-wheel petrol car along and with his three brothers formed the Lanchester Engine Company. George, her younger brother became chief designer. His first post-war car, the Lanchester hp 40 limousine, was considered to be ‘the finest car in the world’.
After attending the Birkbeck Institution and the Maria Grey training college, Edith first worked as a teacher and then a clerk-secretary working for a firm in the City of London. By 1895 Edith was a confirmed socialist and member of the Social Democratic Federation. The SDF had an explicitly socialist platform, was strongly opposed to the Liberal Party which then claimed to represent the labour movement in parliament. Their progressive programme, called for a 48-hour workweek, the abolition of child labour, compulsory and free and secular education, equality for women, and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange by a democratic state
Edith was teaching when she was was lodging with Mary Gray – fellow SDF member and her family in 72 Este Road. Mary was instrumental in setting up Socialist Sunday School. Mary had run a soup kitchen for the children of the dock strike. Her aim, on realising they had little or no education, was to influence and educate them and make them aware of their socialist responsibilities and provide what was lacking in their day schools. She started the first Sunday with only one other besides her own two children but twenty years later there were approximately one hundred and twenty schools throughout the country, twenty of them being in London itself
In 1895 Edith, known as Biddy, she announced that, in protest against Britain’s patriarchal marriage laws, she was going to cohabit with her lover, an Irish factory railway clerk James or Shamus Sullivan. Her socialist feminist convictions had led her to conclude that the wife’s vow to obey her husband was oppressive and she was politically opposed to the institution of marriage. Her friend Eleanor Marx similarly lived with her lover, which we would less romantically refer to as ‘partner’ nowadays. , Their “free love union” was scheduled to begin on 26 October 1895. It caused quite a storm because of the actions and antics of her family and the ensuing furore.
Incensed, Edith’s father and brothers barged into her house and forcibly subjected their daughter to an examination by Dr George Fielding-Blandford, a leading psychiatrist and author of Insanity and Its Treatment. Edith was pronounced mad at the scene and, when she physically tried to resist and fight back, was handcuffed by her father. Blandford justified his action by describing Edith’s planned action as an act of ‘social suicide. After signing emergency commitment papers under the 1890 Lunacy Act, Fielding-Blandford had Lanchester imprisoned; her own father and brothers bound her wrists and dragged her to a carriage destined for the Priory Hospital in Roehampton.
The psychiatrist explained his reasoning in a contemporary news report. Edith Lanchester “had always been eccentric, and had lately taken up with Socialists of the most advanced order. She seemed quite unable to see that the step she was about to take meant utter ruin. If she had said that she had contemplated suicide a certificate might have been signed without question. I considered I was equally justified in signing one when she expressed her determination to commit this social suicide. She is a monomaniac on the subject of marriage, and I believe her brain had been turned by Socialist meetings and writings, and that she was quite unfit to take care of herself.”The “Supposed Cause” of her insanity was recorded on the certificates as “over-education”
Almost immediately a meeting was held with the help of John Burns Battersea MP, the Commissioners of Lunacy proclaimed her sane though “foolish” and released her.
The New York Times reported that the affair had “rivet the attention of three kingdoms” and that “no penny paper had printed less than ten columns on this engrossing subject during the week”. Her SDF supporters sang The Red Flag from outside the asylum’s walls and beneath Edith’s barred window. The Marquis of Queensbury wrote to The Standard offering the couple a cheque for £100 as a wedding present if they would go through the legal marriage ceremony but under protest.
The history of the Legitimation League is fascinating. According to John Sweeney, an undercover policeman who infiltrated the organisation, the authorities feared that this ‘open and unashamed’ attack on marriage laws was the vanguard of an attack on all laws. After the national press published a letter signed by peers and clergymen urging the use of ‘the strong hand of the law’ against the free love movement.
There was interesting tensions between The Theosophy Society, Liberal and Socialist attitude to sex, sexual relations and celibacy. The Independent Labour Party Leader, Keir Hardie, for instance accused Edith of discrediting socialism. I think her stand was a brave and radical challenge by a socialist feminist to the institution of marriage and to late Victorian society’s highly conservative attitudes. Incidentally, as a Humanist celebrant I back the campaign for Civil Partnerships for all couples and not just same sex couples.
As I am always looking for Battersea connections I noted from a book on Theosophy and Feminism in England that Edith was a member of the Free Press Defence Committee alongside Charlotte Despard represent the the Theosophy Society after it was set up when Havelock Ellis’s book on homosexuality which was distributed by the league was seized and condemned as obscene at the subsequent trial. The indictment included, as evidence of obscenity, poems and articles by women; the judge was outraged by women’s active involvement with the paper, and tried to bar female spectators from the courtroom.
By the end of the 1890s marriage versus free love was a regular, if controversial, topic of debate in novels, plays and stories, newspaper articles and public meetings.
Edith and Shamus set up home in Lewisham and had two children. They lived together until his death in 1945. Edith never saw her father again.
Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986 was Biddy and Shamus’s daughter. Elsa became a famous actress. She danced at the inauguration of the Battersea Labour Party Women’s section when invited by Caroline Ganley who was asked to set it up by Charlotte Despard in Battersea Lower Town Hall.
She danced in the Lower Town Hall aged 16 for the inauguration of the Battersea Labour Party Women’ Section at the request of Caroline Ganley who was asked to establish the Women’s Section by Charlotte Despard who gave her funds to do it.
Elsa studied dance as a child and as a teenager went to Paris as a pupil of Isadora Duncan. After the first world war she began performing in theatre and cabaret, where she established her career over the following decade. She met the actor Charles Laughton in 1927, and they were married two years later. She began playing small roles in British films, including the role of Anne of Cleves with Laughton in The Private Life of Henry V111 (1933) His success in American films resulted in the couple moving to Hollywood where Elsa played small film roles.
Her role as the title character in Bride of Frankenstein(1935) brought her recognition. She played supporting roles through the 1940s and 1950s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting actress for Come to the Stable (1949) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the last of twelve films in which she appeared with Laughton. Following Laughton’s death in 1962, Lanchester resumed her career with appearances in such Disney films as Mary Poppins (1964), That Darn Cat (1965) and Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968). The horror film Willard (1971) was highly successful, and one of her last roles was in Murder by Death (1976).
She began teaching dance in the Duncan style and gave classes to children in Lewisham south London where she was brought up and earned some welcome extra income for her household.
She started the Children’s Theatre, and later the Cave of Harmony, a nightclub at which modern plays and cabaret turns were performed. She revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights. She became sufficiently famous for Columbia to invite her into the recording studio to make 78 rpm discs of four of the numbers she sang in these revues: “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” and “He Didn’t Oughter” were on one disc (recorded in 1926) and “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m Living in Sin” and “The Ladies Bar” were on the other (recorded 1930).
Her cabaret and nightclub appearances led to more serious stage work and it was in a play by Arnold Bennett called Mr Prohack (1927) that Lanchester first met another member of the cast, Charles Laughton. In 1938, Lanchester published a book about her relationship with Laughton, Charles Laughton and I. In March 1983, Lanchester released an autobiography, entitled Elsa Lanchester Herself. In the book she alleges that she and Charles never had children because Laughton was homosexual.
Elsa died in California on December 1986 aged 84, at the The Motion Picture Hospital from pneumonia having suffered from two strokes.
It is an eclectic mix of some Battersea women but they are the one’s I have chosen because they all intrigued and interested me and as ever I enjoyed the research and all the distracting lateral searches that inevitably comes with researching on the internet.
The three women featured here Maureen Kenny, Micheline Sheehy Skeffington and Margaretta D’Arcy have contributed to Galway life in their own way –
Maureen Kenny in the bookshop
Michelene Sheehy Skeffington
Margaretta Darcy
bookseller extraordinaire, challenger of NUIG in its misogyny and an indomitable political and theatrical activist.
(7) Maureen Kenny
Jun
Seamus Heaney once described Maureen Kenny, who has died aged 89, as “the Madonna of the Manuscripts”, an accurate description for a woman who devoted most of her life to the promotion of new Irish writers and artists. https://www.kennys.ie/news/maureen-kenny-obituary/
Maureen was born in Glebe Street, Mohill, Co Leitrim, the eldest of three children. Her father died suddenly when she was four years old leaving her mother with three young children and a business she knew nothing about. Next door was a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks which was taken over by the black and tans. On a couple of occasions they took the infant Maureen and used her as a human shield on top of their truck while driving around Mohill randomly shooting in through windows.
Her mother was an extraordinary woman who saved every penny to give them the best possible education. Maureen went to school locally in Mohill and then attended Saint Louis Convent, Monaghan on a scholarship. She then went on to win a scholarship to UCG (NUIG) in 1936 and on her first day there she met Des Kenny. As Des often said later “that was that”. They married on graduating and rented two rooms on High Street in Galway, setting up a bookshop in one and living in the other.
On November 29th, 1940 they opened the doors of what was to become the internationally renowned Kenny’s Bookshop. Hundreds of people claim to have been there on the first day although Maureen remembered it as being very quiet. It was during the war and people had little money for food, let alone for the luxury of books and so the early days were all about survival.
They stocked the shop by borrowing books from their friends and relations and buying new books with what little money they had. They tried many different ideas like selling second-hand school books, running a lending library or placing book stalls in hotels and factories.
Maureen was ahead of her time and employed the strategy of direct marketing before the phrase had been heard of. She put hand-written cards in hotels and B&Bs with “a suggestion for a rainy day”. The suggestion of course, was to visit Kennys.
However, despite their efforts Maureen and Des could not survive by the bookshop alone and so Des went out to work elsewhere, leaving Maureen to run the shop.
Their eldest son, Tom was born in 1944 in the bookshop on High Street and shortly afterwards they were able to move to a house in Salthill where their other five children, Jane, Dessy, Gerry, Monica and Conor, were born. Maureen’s six children were virtually reared on books and so it was no surprise that five of them joined her in the business.
In the mid 1960s her husband Des rejoined the family business and from then on it began to expand. They knocked down part of their house in Salthill and opened an art gallery in 1968. They built a book bindery in the back garden and rented additional premises to cater for their expanding stock of books. A great emphasis was placed on exporting and they instilled in their family a love of all things Irish, especially books.
The bookshop began to gain an international reputation. Maureen was the one constant in all of this growth and artists and writers from all over the world came to meet her and to avail of her vast knowledge of Irish interest material. As John McGahern once said “Mrs Kenny misses nothing”. One of her great gifts was her phenomenal memory as she would report the arrival of out of print books books to people who had asked for them years before. As one customer said: “who needs amazon.com when you have Mrs Kenny?”
She loved to encourage young writers and rejoiced in their success. Aspiring authors would delight in the fact that Maureen had taken the time to read their books and was now promoting them. The large collection of signed photographs of writers who had visited was testimony to Maureen’s popularity.
Maureen never regarded the shop as work. To her it was a genuine pleasure to stand behind the counter in High Street, which she did for 66 years, only retiring when it was decided to transfer the books business online. Even in her 80s she wasn’t afraid of change in business, indeed she was quite visionary and when the bookshop closed its doors to go online in 2006 her comment was “you have to look forward, you have to move with times.”
Maureen was a founder member of the Leitrim People’s Association in Galway. She was very involved with Our Lady’s Girls Club and the Soroptimists. She was honoured many times for her extraordinary contribution to cultural life in Ireland and especially in Galway.
Bord Failte made her an Honorary Ambassador for promoting Ireland in 1990. Maureen and her husband Des were the first honorary life members of the Galway Chamber of Commerce.
The following article is from their 75th anniversary of bookselling in Galway written by Tom Kenny, her eldest son. I knew Tom as I was and am friends as his sister Jane – we were in the same year in Taylor’s hill secondary school. I recall getting a lift to Dublin with Des Kenny when myself and my friend Kathryn Lydon were heading off to work in Jersey in 1964. I conducted a funeral a few years ago of Ronald Gray of Hammersmith Books that Conor Kenny attended as they had bought Ronald’s the entire collection.
The Kenny family. Jane is in blue and Tom is the grey bearded one.
This year Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway celebrates 75 years of bookselling and 21 years of selling online as kennys.ie. Our staff of 18 includes eight Kennys. We stock about 650,000 volumes, new, second-hand and antiquarian books. In addition to selling on kennys.ie, we work with Amazon, ABE, Alibris and other portals to sell into countries all over the world. We also offer free shipping worldwide.
After meeting at UCG they graduated and got married. They had no jobs but they wanted to stay in Ireland. It was during the war, they had no money and there were few prospects. Both came from book-loving families and so they decided to open a bookshop. It seemed like an act of madness, but they were young, very much in love, tenacious and not afraid of hard work. They leased the ground floor of a building in High Street, Galway. The bank loaned them £100 with which they bought some stock and friends and relations gave them books. The shop was tiny, but they opened with hopes and dreams and very little fanfare on November 29th, 1940.
To add a little colour, Maureen introduced crafts, handmade locally in the late 1940s. In 1951 she hosted her first exhibition and this in turn led to visual artists showing their work. A major development in the 1950s was the purchase of a second-hand duplicating machine which was installed in my bedroom at home, and the family began to crank out catalogues. These catalogues gave the shop a new status in Ireland, and introduced us to customers abroad. Our horizons were expanding. We were selling mostly second-hand books and were gaining in experience and expertise. Our speciality was (and still is) books of Irish interest. Des was on the road at every opportunity buying libraries and the quality of the stock improved.
The Irish language has always been very important to us and we have a uniquely extensive stock of Irish language books.
Regular visitors at this time were Brendan Behan, Mary Lavin, Walter Macken and Austin Clarke. Graham Greene visited and subsequently carried on a correspondence. William Randolph Hearst syndicated a major article on the bookshop in all of his newspapers.
In 1965, our father Des came back into the business on a full-time basis and his dynamism and vision, combined with Maureen’s pragmatism and by now legendary knowledge of books had a transforming effect. They opened the first commercial art gallery in the west of Ireland with an exhibition of paintings by Seán Keating. From then on, we hosted exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, stained glass, ceramics, book launches, readings, signings etc. We began to photograph visiting writers and artists and opened a shop dedicated to antiquarian maps and prints. As children, we were immersed in books so it was no surprise that five of us joined the business and in 1974 our parents built a book bindery in their back garden for Gerry.
Sorley McLean did a reading, Séamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ellmann and William Trevor visited, Brendan Kennelly and Frederick Forsyth opened exhibitions. President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh caused traffic chaos when he asked his driver to stop “for a minute” while he stepped in and talked to our mother about books. Those in the cars behind did not want to blow their horns at the Uachtarán’s car.
With Frank McCourt author of Angela’s Ashes
In the early 1980s we managed to buy the High Street building and also the building behind it which backed on to Middle Street. We linked the two buildings together and transferred the maps, the art gallery and a store full of books to the city-centre location. We began to publish a series of books, mostly of local interest. The US Library of Congress appointed us as their Irish suppliers.
When Roald Dahl spent two days signing his books, it was one-way traffic through the shop and the queues went up to the top of the street. The launch of Breandán Ó hEithir’s novel, Lig Sin i gCathú, was broadcast live on Radio 1 for 90 minutes. Brian Friel opened an exhibition; Jurgen Lodemann made a documentary for German television on the bookshop; Samuel Beckett signed photographic mounts so that his “portrait” could be included with the exhibition of author’s photographs.
President Hillery opened an exhibition of portraits of Irish writers entitled Faces in a Bookshop with some 50 writers in attendance. Benedict Kiely, Noel Browne and Maeve Binchy also opened exhibitions. Derek Walcott, Miroslav Holub , Sir Sidney Nolan and Allen Ginsberg visited. Andrei Voznesensky, Margaret Attwood, Jung Chang and Thomas Keneally visited.
In 1994, we became the first company in Ireland to have a website and the second bookshop in the world to go online. This exciting development slowly changed the dynamics of bookselling and we were now travelling extensively in the US and Japan networking, selling, building up collections for libraries. Des Jr. started a book club for individual customers.
In 1996, we closed temporarily while we completely rebuilt the interior of the High St /Middle St premises. The new complex was launched by John McGahern who opened his speech with the line: “Mrs Kenny misses nothing”.
Face to Face was published, a collection of some 200 author’s photographs taken in the bookshop.
We bought the entire contents of the long established Hammersmith Books in London when Ronald Gray died. ( I conducted his funeral that Conor and Geraldine Kenny attended in Lambeth Crematorium).
Our mother was conferred with an honorary degree by UCG. Part of her citation read: “She and all she stands for remained a constant when virtually everything around her had disappeared, been redeveloped or surrendered to more perishable, transient tastes. Her metier represents one that is entwined with Galway’s history”. In 2006, she retired after 66 years behind the counter.
Various authors in the bookshop including Margaretta Darcy and John Arden.
Seamus Heaney opened a John Behan exhibition during which he referred to Maureen Kenny as The Madonna of the Manuscripts. Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee visited.
Several years ago, we realised we were selling more books online than on the high street, so we decided to move about a mile away to a large industrial building on the Liosbán Estate on the Tuam Road. It does not have the character of the inner-city shop, as it is geared up for our export operation. Today, online sales account for 80 per cent of sales but we also retail books and have done a great deal to retain as much of the atmosphere of the old and we still host book launches and readings. As I write this, author Patricia Forde is here reading from and discussing her new book, The Wordsmith, with more than 100 schoolchildren.
Portrait of Maureen by Jenny O’Brien from her series Galway Inspirational Women.
Maureen had a strong faith, was great company, had a keen sense of humour and loved life. She passed on important values to her children, such as charity, perseverance and a love of things Irish. For her the family was the nucleus of civilisation which was illustrated by the fact that so many of her children and grand-children were around her in her last moments. She died March 25th 2008.
(8) Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington
is a botanist and plant ecologist who was a lecturer in Galway University. She has also become a champion of women’s equality by challenging the University for gender discrimination when she won a landmark case against her former employer of 34 years, NUI Galway. The Equality Tribunal found that the university had discriminated against the botanist for promotion because of her gender.
Of course, Micheline is from a renowned family and the name Sheehy Skeffington – wihout a hyphen – is well known in Ireland. Her grandparents Hanna and Francis Sheehy Skeffington played a significant role in Irish political and public life in the last century. Hanna is one of my heroines.
In 1985 I had been involved with Irish Women in Wandsworth in putting on an exhibition on Charlotte Despard in Battersea Arts Centre. I visited the National Newspaper Library at Colindale and the Fawcett Library which was then based in the east end. I was contacted by Jill Norris editor of a series of biographies entitled Women of Our Time who had found my name among the list of researchers at the Fawcett Library resulting in an exchange about Hanna as a worthy subject for the series. This led me to contact Andree Sheehy Skeffington who married Owen, Hanna and Frank’s only child and Michelene’s father to find out if she knew of any proposed biography of Hanna. It transpired that there was one about to be published by Leah Levenson. Below is an extract from her letter. I treasure such hand-written letters.
Dr Sheehy Skeffington is a plant ecologist with an interest in terrestrial ecosystems, especially wetlands including turloughs, peatlands, heathlands, river flood-meadows and salt marshes. She also carries out research on sustainable farming for conservation, with special focus on grassland management for conservation.
Interests also include sustainable agriculture in the tropics, with publications on Indonesian and Cuban sustainable forest and agricultural management.
Appointed to The Heritage Council 1995-2000. Chaired Council Wildlife Committee 1999-2000.
Council Member Tropical Biology Association 1993-present. Taught on Uganda course 2012.
Appointed in 2005 to the Project Advisory Group for the international award-winning Burren LIFE programme and is newly-appointed to the Aran LIFE programme Advisory Board.
Academic representative on the Irish Ramsar Wetlands Committee
Courses: BPS302 Plant Ecology and BPS405 Ecology and Conservation Issues. MSc in Sustainable Resources, Policy and Practice; MSc in Biodiversity and Land-use Planning. All include residential and /or day field excursions.
Curator of the NUI Galway Vascular Plant Herbarium
There is a list of her published articles and books.
I have been following Micheline in her gender discrimination challenge to NUIG and contributed to the crowd funding.
National University of Ireland Galway has been instructed by the Equality Tribunal to immediately promote a female academic and pay her €70,000 in damages. The ruling comes after the tribunal found that the college had discriminated against her on the grounds of her gender.
Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington applied for a senior lectureship post at the university in 2009 but was not appointed. In its ruling in favour of Dr Sheehy Skeffington, the tribunal described NUIG’s interview process as “ramshackle”.
It ordered the college to review its policies and procedures in relation to promotions and to report back. Dr Sheehy Skeffington is a highly qualified botanist, widely published, and described as an “inspirational” lecturer by a former student. After 19 years as a college lecturer at NUIG, she applied to become a senior lecturer for the fourth time.
She was not appointed and after an unsuccessful internal appeal, she took a case based on gender discrimination to the tribunal. The tribunal found in her favour, citing both direct and indirect discrimination.
It found that on paper promotion to senior lecturer at NUIG seemed to be fair. But it said its implementation has fallen short. There was no training for interviewers, no meeting to discuss candidates. The suggestions of the external interviewer on the panel were ignored. The fact that there was no marking scheme for the interview, it said, highlighted the “ramshackle” approach.
The tribunal said it was worrying that one male candidate who was promoted was not even eligible to apply for the position. It found that men at the university had a one in two chance of being promoted to senior lecturer. Female academics’ chances were less than one in three.
The tribunal ordered the university to retrospectively appoint Dr Sheehy Skeffington to the post and to pay her damages of €70,000.
The university has said it accepts the tribunal’s decision “unreservedly” and it will “take immediate steps to implement the … findings”.
It said: “The University very much regrets the distress caused to Dr Sheehy Skeffington in this matter, thanks her for her contribution over many years and wishes her well in the future.”
One of her predecessors was Professor Maureen de Valera who was my botany lecturer in 1964/65. (Being the only botanist on the staff, de Valéra taught all of the botanical courses, with the work load doubling when the lectures were offered in Irish. . She was the first Chair and Professor of Botany at UCG. Her specialism was algae.)
“The report fails to address, in any meaningful way, the discrimination and unfair treatment faced by administrative, general operative and technical staff, academics and others on precarious contracts or casually employed, researchers or students. The few recommendations regarding some of these staff or students are token gestures or misguided proposals which may make matters worse.
“The report proposes actions which may result in more academic women being promoted to senior positions. However, gender quotas are not a long-term solution to the underlying problem of institutional discrimination across all grades of staff. Quotas will not resolve the fundamental, underlying problem of unfair treatment of those with caring responsibilities, a majority of whom are women.”
The ongoing case of the women lecturers against NUIG is continuing.
The four taking the case are Dr Margaret Hodgins, Dr Sylvie Lannegrand, Dr Adrienne Gorman and Dr Róisín Healy. The fifth female lecturer, Dr Elizabeth Tilley is pursuing a separate case in the Labour Court.They had all been deemed eligible for promotion to Senior Lecturer posts in 2009 but were all turned down.
President Jim Browne and NUIG having insisted all these years that it was for the five women to prove the injustice in court as there was nothing management could do to put it right, this hearing for four of the women’s cases would have shown management were attempting to stop the women from doing that.
Micheline has embarked on another project which is repeating the epic lecture tour of the USA undertaken by her grandmother Hanna publicising what had happened to her grandfather Francis -a pacifist – was shot by a British firing squad during the Easter Rising. Hanna is Ireland’s most famous suffragette.
When her husband Francis despite him being a pacifist, Hanna undertook an epic lecture tour of the US, publicising what had happened. This autumn her granddaughter, Micheline, also known for her fight for gender equality and justice, is repeating Hanna’s tour and we plan to film it for a documentary.
She says “This autumn, 100 years on, I will retrace my grandmother, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington’s epic lecture tour of the US. This tour was so important for Ireland’s fight for independence, yet has largely been forgotten. I want to publicise what she did by making a documentary of my trip. I will spend three months speaking in the places she visited and, like her, my tour will be funded by the organisations and communities that host me. But I also want to film the tour and the people and places I encounter.
I will visit places associated with her feminist friends, like Jane Addams, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman.We’ll film key sections of the tour to provide a basis for the production of a full documentary on Hanna’s journey. We hope to have this broadcast during 2018, the anniversary of Irish women getting the vote – which happened because of the actions of suffragettes like Hanna. We are seeking funding simply for the filming of the tour so that the eventual documentary can weave the thread between Hanna’s epic journey then, Irish-Americans and feminist activism today, and Hanna’s suffrage activity in Ireland. It resonates with what my father, Owen, did to champion the cause of human rights in 20th century Ireland, as well as my own recent fight for gender equality.”
The last entry The mediation that has been ongoing between NUI Galway and the four female academics taking High Court cases for gender discrimination in the 08/09 promotion round to senior lecturer has finally ended in failure……
With the meditation over, Micheline and this campaign can again publicise NUI Galway’s gender discrimination. Micheline’s lecture tour will ensure there are many opportunities, starting with coverage in Ireland during August before she goes, then in the US with media coverage of the tour there, and then again here when she returns in November. Every time she speaks to the media or gives one of the many lectures about her grandmother’s famous tour, Micheline will also reference the campaign and the injustice for the five women. AS will the documentary about Hanna she plans. You can support what she is doing and help highlight the gender discrimination at NUI Galway by contributing to the crowd funding to film the tour, for the documentary Hanna and Me- Passing on the Flame.
Whatever happens NUIG doesn’t look good in terms of its gender equality.
I hope Micheline succeeds in getting the funding for the tour and film, the four women lecturers are successful in their fight and that the women of Galway stay assertive, challenging and standing up to gender inequality wherever they encounter it.
(9) Margaretta Darcy is the most bolshie and active protesters of the 14 Galway women.
Margaretta D’Arcy is a writer, playwright, actress and peace-activist is known for addressing Irish nationalism, civil liberties and women’s rights.
Margaretta was born in London in 1934 to a Russian Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father. Her father, Joseph, was a tenement child from Henrietta Street in Dublin and was active in the IRA during the War of Independence. He later met Miriam Billig. As the daughter of an Irish freedom fighter and a Jewish doctor, a second-generation refugee from Odessa in the Ukraine, this split identity informed her battles in the theatrical and political worlds she has inhabited. She was the third of four girls in the family who were moved between England and Ireland, and to different addresses in Ireland.
D’Arcy worked in small theatres in Dublin from the age of fifteen and later became an actress. She was an acting ASM at the new, progressive-looking Hornchurch Rep in the early 1950s and graduated to the Royal Court where she became an actress in the heady days of that theatre’s radical resuscitation under the charismatic George Devine. For a time she was one of the company’s most flaming members. Protest was constant in her life. She joined Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 in 1960.
She met and married the playwright John Arden in 1957. She gave birth to They married in 1957 and had five sons: the eldest, Finn, is a film editor; Jacob works for City University in London; Neuss is a safety inspector on the London underground; and Adam works in construction in Australia. A fifth son, Gwalchmai, was born with spina bifida and died a few weeks later. They moved to a house on a village green in East Yorkshire next an RAF/US Air Force base housing nuclear missiles. She wrote a letter to the American commander of the base saying she and her family felt personally endangered by his weapons and asking him to examine his conscience, then cycled over with a baby on her back to deliver it. The commander’s reply, through the local police, was a threat (not acted upon) of 25 years in jail for encouraging a soldier to abandon his post.
Decades of playwriting, pageantry, pirate radio, books and protest followed.., They settled in Galway in the 70s and established the Galway theatre Workshop in 1976. They had a cottage in Corrandulla a few miles from the city. ( My Dad, as consulting civil engineer, was involved in some works they had done to it.) We used to see them as we passed their cottage as we had ours nearby in Tonnegurrane. I remember seeing them riding their bikes in the boreen around our cottage. They also had a little ex-corporation house in St Bridget’s Place in Bohermore where her radio station was based. (I had corresponded with her about a women’s festival she was organising).
Her four boys lived in London, in India and on an island in Lough Corrib before they were through their teens. They saw their mother imprisoned in Shillong Jail, in northeast India, and, later, in Armagh for refusing to pay a fine incurred during a republican rally. During the Greenham Common women’s peace camp, which existed from 1981 to 1990, she spent two days in solitary confinement at Holloway Prison for refusing to adhere to the strip-search policy.She was jailed in the North for campaigning for political status for the women in Armagh prison and again in London for the Greenham protests against Cruise missiles. In 2014, she was imprisoned after she refused to sign a bond saying that she wouldn’t trespass on non-public parts of Shannon Airport. Her arrest was a consequence of trespassing on airport property during protests over US military stopovers at Shannon.
Here they are protesting outside the Aldwych Theatre which was staging John’s play The Island of the Mighty.
It is interesting to hear about them from their children’s perspective, especially since John died in 2012. Finn admitted their embarrasment when they were teenagers about their parents which is normal. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/behind-bars-with-the-shannon-one-1.1675241 Her son Finn said: “She was always a bit of a rebel really, her background kind of seen to that. The circle she was hanging around in the late fifties would have included Francis Bacon and Brendan Behan, people like that and then she met my Dad.”
Her friend the film director Leila Doolan said: “She’s indomitable, really,” Doolan says. “People sometimes think of Margaretta as a person without a sense of humour, but if you read her memoir you see the absolute hilarity with which she views life, while at the same time being very serious about it.”
Her plays include The Pinprick of History; Vandaleur’s Folly; Women’s Voices from W. of Ireland; Prison-voice of Countess Markievicz; A Suburban Suicide (a radio play, BBC3, 1995); Lajwaad (The Good People, play by Abdel Kader Alloula, adapted by M. D’Arcy for readings in London, 1995); and Dublin (Irish Writers’ Centre, 1996).
Plays devised as group productions include Muggins is a Martyr; The Vietnam War-game; 200 Years of Labour; The Mongrel Fox; No Room at the Inn; Mary’s Name; Seán O’Scrúdu; Silence.
Plays written in collaboration with John Arden include The Business of Good Government; The Happy Haven; Ars Longa Vita Brevis; The Royal Pardon; The Hero Rises Up; The Ballygombeen Bequest; The Non-Stop Connolly Show; Keep the People Moving (BBC Radio); Portrait of a Rebel (RTÉ Television); The Manchester Enthusiasts (BBC 1984 and RTÉ 1984 under the title The Ralahine Experiment); Whose is the Kingdom? (9 part radio play, BBC 1987). Her publishers include Methuen, Cassells, Allison & Busby (formerly Pluto Press), all London.
Margaretta has written various memoirs about theatrical activism, Armagh women’s prison, her Shannon Airport protests at American war planes and her pirate radio exploits.
Timothy O’Grady reviewed her Guantanamo Granny which is what press called her.
“I first met Margaretta and John Arden about 40 years ago. John died in the midst of the Shannon protests. He had cancer, was wheelchair-bound, arrived at a crisis and went to hospital, where he was left on a trolley without food or drink, suffered dehydration and blood poisoning and finally left the world buoyed on a morphine cloud. You can feel lucky in your life if you meet one such man as him. He had a sonorous voice, a magnificent mane of hair, wit, learning, vigour, a noble bearing and a purity of dedication to his art. In his use of ballad and verse and in his ability to give his characters and predicaments the weight of the mythical he was like an Elizabethan, with in addition the conscience of a Leveller.
Jail time is an interlude in this book and, for me, a revelation – the poems, the bird whistling, the intrigues, the sympathies and cruelties of the warders, the failures and at times well-intentionedness of the regime and above all the astonishing cast. Irish women’s prisons, it is here revealed, are full of people from all over the world. There are the mother-daughter chip-shop owners running drugs, foreign nationals shopped by aggrieved boyfriends for visa violations, a Vietnamese with one of the largest indoor marijuana operations in the country, Polish pickpockets and a Hungarian on the run from her Irish bisexual butcher boyfriend and her own country’s mafia. The latter helps Margaretta with sacks full of post from old friends, Irish schoolchildren and supporters from all over the world. John Berger sends a drawing of a magnolia from the Alps.
Activists from the brilliant feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA offer a series of stimulating reflections on the influence of Margaretta D’Arcy on their own agitation for abortion law reform in Ireland. The second contribution is from Robert Leach, author of the only book-length account of the partnership between Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden (a partnership that generated a series of works of rich significance for contemporary British theatre). Leach offers a celebratory overview of Margaretta D’Arcy’s unconventional book Loose Theatre on the 10th anniversary of its publication, drawing attention to her conceptualisation of a ‘loose’ theatre – theatre as a source for acts of resistance taking place across diverse times and places, from theatre stages, criminal courts, streets and traffic islands, temporarily transformed into stages for denouncing violence and oppression.
We, the direct action pro-choice feminist performance group, Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., pay tribute to the lineage of Irish feminist activism pioneered by Margaretta D’Arcy. In this short piece, we link the feminist protest of D’Arcy to contemporary Irish feminist activism focused on reproductive rights.
I joined them and Ann Rossiter (who wrote about the abortion trail) for this action at Kings cross station on repealing the 8th Amendentment. This is where many Irish women arrive to procure an abortion denied to them in Ireland.
Robert Leach who first met them 40 years ago writes: “Sometimes, Margaretta sensed, the State needs to be provoked into engaging with important concerns raised by its citizens. She and Niall Farrell (brother of Mairéad, killed by the SAS in Gibraltar) got over Shannon’s perimeter fence and stood in the runway. It was a long while before anything happened. She thought of lying down and taking a nap. Eventually she was arrested. The Garda told her a file would be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. When she heard nothing further she wrote to the Minister for Justice pointing out that her crime was serious and she should be charged, but if she wasn’t she would take it he and the State approved of any future efforts by her to help stop the takeover of an Irish civilian airport by the US military.
Jail time is an interlude in this book and, for me, a revelation – the poems, the bird whistling, the intrigues, the sympathies and cruelties of the warders, the failures and at times well-intentionedness of the regime and above all the astonishing cast. Irish women’s prisons, it is here revealed, are full of people from all over the world. There are the mother-daughter chip-shop owners running drugs, foreign nationals shopped by aggrieved boyfriends for visa violations, a Vietnamese with one of the largest indoor marijuana operations in the country, Polish pickpockets and a Hungarian on the run from her Irish bisexual butcher boyfriend and her own country’s mafia. The latter helps Margaretta with sacks full of post from old friends, Irish schoolchildren and supporters from all over the world. John Berger sends a drawing of a magnolia from the Alps.”
Margaretta has been a member of Aosdána since its inauguration in 1981 by the Arts Council which honours artists.
I found this clip of her interview on Galway Bay FM about their culture night contribution on the Non Stop Connolly Show at Katie’s cottage in the Claddagh where she was joined by Galway’s chanteuse the wonderful Mary Coughlan and my favourite bolshie poet Rita Anne Higgins- all grannies.
Margaretta D’Arcy, granny aged 83 has lived such a bustly, madcap life of a political activist using theatrical ploys, plays and memoirs to publicise any cause that she espouses. She makes me feel exhausted.
Here is the link to Galway Women Part 1 Nora Barnacle, Augusta Gregory and Rita Ann Higgins.
For three decades, Garry Hynes has been Ireland’s most dynamic and fearless theater director. With her company, Druid, based in Galway, in the West of Ireland, she has used her vast imaginative energy to re-interpret the national classics, such as the plays of John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey. She has also put her talent at the disposal of contemporary writers. She was the first to stage the plays of the young Martin McDonagh, and in 1998 she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for direction, of McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Since the 1980s, Hynes has had a close working relationship with Tom Murphy, ranked with Brian Friel as among Ireland’s greatest living writers. Murphy has been the most restless imagination at work in Irish theater since his second play, A Whistle in the Dark, hit London’s West End, in 1961. He is the artist most of us Irish writers look to for inspiration and example. Thus, it will be fascinating to see three of his plays directed by Hynes at the Lincoln Center Festival, July 5 to 14. The plays deal with loss and emigration, and dramatize illusion and self-delusion. Hynes’s method as a director is forensic: she strips away, using her sharp sense of the abiding power of the theatrical image, cajoling actors toward the emotional and intellectual core of a play. In the past, Hynes and Murphy together have produced the very best of Irish theater. Re-united, they are likely to cause sparks to fly.
Gary Hynes we remember from the very early days when she and friends started to stage plays in the tiny room at the back of The Coachman in Dominc Street now forever associated with Galway and the Druid. Her Playboy of the Western World was unforgettable.
I was born in Ballaghadereen, in county Roscommon, in Ireland. When I was 12 years old, I moved to Galway, my father’s native county. I was the eldest child. My father was a passionate Gaelgóir (Irish speaker). My parents spoke to me in Irish and I spoke mostly Irish until I went to school. Most of the other children spoke English and there was some sort of distance (between us) at school, I wasn’t able to say the Hail Mary. I rebelled against (the language) in an ignorant way and I’m probably the least fluent Irish speaker in my family now. As a child, I cherished my own imaginative hinterland. We are all creatures of our imagination. As a young person, I was taken to see amateur plays; there was, and still is, a very vibrant amateur theatre circuit in Ireland. When I was 18 or 19, in the early 1970s, I went to work on a student visa to New York. I saw theatre off Broadway. Those were great influences.
She was educated at St. Louis Convent Monaghan, the Dominican Convent Galway, and UCG.
She is a co-founder of the Druid Theatre company with Mick Lally and Marie Mullen in 1975 after meeting through the drama society of U.C.G. where they studied.
Mick Lally with Druid co founders Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen
She was Druid’s artistic director from 1975 to 1991, and again from 1995 to date. Hynes directed for the Abbey theatre from 1984 and was its artistic director from 1991 to 1994, and also the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange Manchester, the Kennedy Center and the Royal Court Theatre, London.
After 15 years with Druid, I began to feel that it was better for me to leave and I accepted an offer to become artistic director of the Abbey Theatre (Ireland’s national theatre, where Hynes was employed from 1991 to 1994). I moved to Dublin and bought a house there, where I still live. Four years later, Druid asked me to return on a temporary basis and somewhat reluctantly I agreed. I’m still here. Druid has kept me in Ireland. I fell in love with New York when I went there at 18 or 19 – it’s still my second home – but then, with time, and from the outside, I began to see better the kind of supportive place to make theatre that Druid was.
When I came back to Druid, I asked to see the plays that had been submitted while I was away. I was trawling through the backlog when I found Martin McDonagh’s work. He had sent in three of them, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane. All of them stood out. I met his agent and optioned all three of his plays. I thought, “Here was a real writer for the theatre” – he could write brilliant dialogue and he tell a story. The Beauty Queen of Leenaneis an international story and it is a timeless story; it’s about a mother and daughter who are closely tied, a love-hate relationship – it’s a fundamental human story. When I first read the play, I knew immediately that Marie would be right for the part of Maureen. Now she’s playing Mag, the mother. We’re privileged, Marie and me, to have had such a long life together.
We were so glad to get to see the Druid production directed by Garry of Bailegangaire in the Donmar Playhouse in 1986 when Siobhain McKenna and Marie Mullen starred in Tom Murphy’s play. Marie Mullen played Mommo in the later production and , of course, for many she is seen as Siobhain’s successor as Ireland’s greatest stage actresses.
Garry and film producer Martha O’Neill became civil partners at a private ceremony in Galway in 2014. A small group of family and close friends attended the ceremony at the Mick Lally Druid Theatre in Galway city. Afterwards, the couple hosted their guests at Nimmo’s Ard Nia restaurant alongside Galway’s famous Spanish Arch.
5)Alice Perry was Europe’s first female engineering graduate. Alice was top of her class in civil engineering, was the first female county surveyor on these islands and fought to protect women workers’ rights. How come we have hardly heard about her until recently, especially in Galway?
Born in Wellpark Galway in 1885, Alice was one of five daughters of James and Martha Perry (née Park). Her father was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. Her uncle, John Perry, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and invented the navigational gyroscope.
After graduating from the High School in Galway, she won a scholarship to study in Royal University Galway later UCG in 1902. Having excelled in mathematics, she changed from studying for a degree in arts to an engineering degree. She graduated with first class honours in 1906. The family appear to have been academically gifted. Her sisters Molly and Nettie also went on to third level education; a third sister Agnes earned BA (1903) and MA (1905) in mathematics from Queen’s College Galway (later UCG then NUIG), taught there in 1903-1904, was a Royal University of Ireland examiner in mathematics in 1906, and later became assistant headmistress at a secondary school in London.
Following her graduation she was offered a senior postgraduate scholarship but owing to her father’s death the following month, she did not take up this position In December 1906 she succeeded her father temporarily as county surveyor for Galway County Council. She remained in this position for a few months until a permanent appointment was made. She was an unsuccessful candidate for the permanent position and for a similar opportunity to be a surveyor in Galway East. She remains the only woman to have been a County Surveyor (County Engineer) in Ireland.
Her work then took her all over this rugged county in all weathers, inspecting roads, walls, piers, footpaths, bridges, courthouses and county buildings and arranging for repairs and upkeep where necessary. This massive workload and her amazing diligence prompted the local newspaper, the Connaught Champion, to note: “The many and arduous duties of County Surveyor have never been better or more faithfully discharged than since they were taken over by Miss Perry.”
After a period of unemployment Alice took stock of her life. Rural Galway provided limited employment opportunities for educated women like herself and her sisters. Her options were limited, but there was one obvious choice if she wanted a professional career: in 1908, she and her sisters emigrated from Ireland to seek work in England.
In 1908 she moved to London with her sisters, where she worked as a Lady Factory Inspector for theHome Office. From there she moved to Glasgow. She met and married Bob Shaw on the 30 September 1916. Shaw was a soldier who died in 1917 on the Western Front.
Perry retired from her inspector’s position in 1921.Perry returned to Ireland on three occasions and visited the Department of Civil Engineering in her old Alma Mater during her 1948 visit. It is unknown if she was shown, or if she remembered, the demonstration theodolite still being used in the department up to the 1950s.
This beautiful, accurate and precisely made surveying instrument had one very special feature. Part of a rib of hair from Perry’s head formed the cross hairs in its reticule – a fitting token of Ireland’s first female engineer who smashed through not one but two glass ceilings and who dedicated a large portion of her life to protecting women’s rights in the workplace.
Britain had the highest number of industrial accidents in the world, with an average of 35,000 workers dying every year with multiples more sustaining injuries. Perry’s engineering training meant she had the technical knowledge to see these dangers and this made her highly effective at this role.
Perry and the other inspectors enforced the law on women’s working hours and the ‘Truck Acts’, which forbade employers paying their employees in kind rather than money, e.g. food in place of money. They battled bravely to reduce industrial poisoning, accidents, ‘bullying’ (sexual harassment), unfair dismissal, and unfair and illegal wage deductions, as well as encouraging better health and safety and proper toilet facilities.
These women proved to be highly motivated and courageous, facing intimidation and risks to their own health and safety while fulfilling their roles.
She became interested in poetry, first publishing in 1922. In 1923 she moved to, the headquarters of Christian Science. Until her death in 1969, Perry worked within the Christian Science movement as a poetry editor and practitioner, publishing seven books of poetry.
She died in Boston on 21 August 1969. The year before her death she placed a plaque in memory of her parents in Galway Presbyterian church.
An All-Ireland medal has been named in her honour, The Alice Perry Medal, with the first prizes awarded in 2014 and on 6th March, 2017, NUI Galway held an official ceremony to mark the naming of the Alice Perry Engineering Building.
Alice Cashel 1878 – 1958) was an Irish nationalist and founding member, with Annie McSwiney, of the Cork Cumann na mBan who became a Galway Co Councillor.
Alice M. Cashel (1878-1958) was one of these revolutionary women. A committed and energetic supporter of rebellion in Ireland from the moment she joined the Sinn Féin party in 1907, she gave her whole life to the cause of Irish independence. To name just a few of her roles, she served as a political organizer, a spy, an educator, a Sinn Féin judge, a finance specialist, vice-chairwoman of the Galway County Council, and author of a pro-rebellion young people’s novel The Lights of Leaca Bán that was taught in schools in the early years of the fledgling Irish Free State.
In the course of supporting an independent Ireland, Alice worked beside many of the leaders and notables of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence including Eamon De Valera, Constance Markievicz, Terrence MacSwiney, Arthur Griffith, Erskine Childers, Bulmer Hobson, George Nobel Plunkett, Sean Heggarty, Alice Stopford Green, Ada English, Kevin O’Higgins, Seán MacEntee, and W. T. Cosgrave. Given the times, she was remarkably mobile. Her activities took her all around both southern and northern Ireland, often on a bicycle and very often on the run from the police or the infamous Black and Tans, auxiliary soldiers the British employed to quash revolutionary activity in Ireland. From reading her own account of what she did during this period, I was intrigued by Alice’s sense of humor, her initiative and toughness, and her indomitable spirit.
Her roles on the council and in the courts were all part of the Republic which had been declared in Dublin. Eventually her home was raided by the Black and Tans. She escaped and made her way to Dublin. Once there the family business had reason to send her to France where she was able to confer with Sean T O’Kelly in Paris. She returned to Galway where she over turned an agreement known as the Galway resolution which had repudiated the authority of the Dail. Cashel was arrested in January when she tried to attend a council meeting. Dr Ada English One of my chosen 14) was also arrested on the same day, 19 January 1921. They were imprisoned with Anita MacMahon of Achill Alice was detained until 25 July 1921.Galway County Council.
In summer 1918 she went to Connemara to organise Cumann na mBan.
Once released Alice moved to Dublin where she worked for Erskine Childers’s office (a Fianna Fail politician and President whose father Robert was a leading republican, author of the espionage thriller The Riddle of the Sands, and was executed during the civil war). At that time she used the name Armstrong since her own name was too well known. She predominately worked in propaganda offices until the treaty was signed. She returned to Galway and was appointed to roles in the council there. She tried to resign on the grounds of being against the treaty they had just signed in London.
In 1935 she published a young adult novel called The Lights of Leaca Bán, which soon became a widely taught text in Irish schools. The very readable but didactic tale offers a highly idealized version of the national struggle, and by extension, a vision for the new Irish state. novel which was widely used in Irish schools. The story is set just before and during the 1916 Easter Rising through a family in the west of Ireland.
Alice lived in St. Catherine’s, Roundstone Co. Galway. Her house should have a commemorative plaque. Alice died 22nd Feb 1958 at the Regional Hospital, Galway and was buried with honours on the 25th in New Cemetery, Bohermore, Galway.
I am writing this piece in reaction to the two songs entitled Galway Girl – one written by Steve Earle and the latest by Ed Sheeran in the Irish tradition of songs about women from a male perspective. They are often fetishised descriptions of hair colour, wearing black velvet band, rosy cheeks or lily white skin, wearing bonnets, carrying baskets, tripping along called Mary, Rose Eileen and , of course, placenaming Galway, Tralee, Mooncoin etc. This fetish is exemplified by the Rose of Tralee beauty pageant where the Roses parade in front of the Prime Minister – an Taoseach ogling the cailini.
My original blog was in response to the blow-in Earle who has returned to the states but when I heard that Sheeran had written one also with the same title, was happy to admit that 400 million people of Irish descent would be interested in it, shamelessly acknowledging that he did it for financial reasons and not bothered by a plagiarism challenge.
The hype in Ireland, particulaly in Galway, about it was OTT especially when the video starring Saoirse Ronan as the Galway Girl appeared.
The Earle black-haired/blue-eyed disappeared after the one night fling after they had a walk on the Salthill prom presumably because she didn’t fancy him in the sober light of day. Stewart Lee, cynical comedian, has sung it on the grounds that his wife’s folk – comedienne Bridget Christie – hail from Galway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfAJAG6dgQI
There is a version as ghaeilge. A cover version of the song by Mundy and Sharon Shannon reached number one and became the most downloaded song of 2008 in Ireland, and has gone on to become the eighth highest selling single in Irish chart history.
So Ed Sheeran thought he could cash in the popularity of a song called Galway Girl. The Sheeran Galway girl it turns out was based on fiddle player Niamh Dunne who is a member of Antrim-based folk group Beoga that collaborated with Sheeran on the track. However, she is not his love interest nor married to an Englishmen and is from from Limerick. But they did spend a night on the tiles in Dublin Irish dancing, Guinness, two Irish whiskeys – Jameson and Powers, Van the Man, a rendition of Carrickfergus, Grafton Street – the usual kind of ingredients of a commercial modern Irish song. Of course, he is eligible for an Irish passport, ginger hair etc. And that makes him Irish. He even has a photo of him as a teenager busking in Galway next to the statue of Oscar Wilde.
So now I feel compelled to write about Galway women. The first thing to note about Galway women is that they are women not girleens. I am one. There is some interesting imagery of women in Galway songs. For a start, you had the women making hay and probably in the uplands digging pratees speaking a language that the English do not know. The woman featured in the song a Galway Shawl wears ‘a bonnet with a ribbon on it’ but ‘she wears no paint nor powder, no none at all’.
Further name check of Galway songs produces the Queen of Connemara which transpires is a boat, Sweet Marie refers to the name of a horse in the Galway Plate race of the Galway Races. There’s the Lass of Aughrim which featured in James Joyce’s Dubliners. There is Pegeen Litir Mor telling how she attracts not only the poet but men from different districts. And so it goes on.
Even our bard Seamus Heaney got in on the act with his Girls Bathing Galway.
No milk-limbed Venus ever rose Miraculous on this western shore; A pirate queen in battle clothes Is our sterner myth.
…in swimsuits, Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed They wade ashore with skips and shouts.
This will always remind my generation of the proclamation of disapproval by the very conservative Bishop Browne about women in Salthill wearing two piece bathing costumes which prompted a letter in response from some Galway women inquiring which piece of the swim suit did his Lordship wish them to remove.
Galway women come in varying shapes, sizes, temperaments, ages and colours. They are emigrants, daughters, mothers sisters, wives, lovers, poets, authors, entrepreneurs, singers, dancers, artists, politicians, teachers, workers, lawyers, doctors, nurses scientists, administrators, shop assistants, etc
I would like to introduce you to a few Galway women. I have decided on fourteen reflecting the number of the tribes of Galway. It is a random choice from poets, to Nationalist activists. I emigrated in 1965 when I was still a teenager and so my choice of women of Galway reflects that as I am now an old pensioner, pagan stranger in the City of Tribes. I have selected Nora Barnacle, Rita Ann Higgins, Michelle Sheehy Skeffington, Siobhain Mac Kenna, Lady Augusta Gregory, Patricia Burke Brogan, Garry Hynes, Alice Perry Civil Engineer, Ada English psychiatrist 1903 UCG, Alice Cashel. Margaretta Darcy, Maureen Kenny, Dolores Keane and Frances Rehel. A younger person would have chosen a different set of Mná na Gaillimhe and it would go on fb and I hope they do.
I will divide this into five separate blog posts.
1)Nora Barnacle is a favourite Galwaywoman role model.
Nora Barnacle the muse and lover of James Joyce and the inspiration of some and his greatest works — Greta Conroy in The Dead, Bertha the common law wife in Exiles and Molly Bloom in Ulysses — all share some of Nora’s character and experiences. Molly’s soliloquy. https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/james-joyce-molly-blooms-soliloquy/ Please do read it out loud whether there is anyone there or not.
Nora Barnacle was born in Galway Workhouse 21 March 1884 father, Thomas Barnacle, a baker in Connemara, was an illiterate man who was 38 years old when she was born. Her mother, Annie Healy, was 28 and worked as a dressmaker.
Between 1886 and 1889, Barnacle’s parents sent her to live with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Healy. During these years, she attended the Convent of Mercy .In the same year, her mother threw her father out for drinking and the couple separated. Barnacle went to live with her mother and her uncle, Tom Healy, at 4 Bowling Green, Galway.
Nora Barnacle left Galway early in 1904. She worked as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel She was 20 years old, a strong-willed girl running from a tyrannical uncle who disapproved of her latest boy friend. Within weeks of her arrival in Dublin she would become the muse and lover of James Joyce.
“I mistook him for a Swedish sailor – His electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls. But when he spoke, well then, I knew him at once for just another Dublin jackeen chatting up a country girl.”
The numerous erotic letters they exchanged suggest they loved each other passionately. Joyce seems to have admired and trusted her, and Barnacle clearly loved Joyce and trusted him enough to agree to leave Ireland with him for the Continent
In October of that same year Nora and Jim would elope to Europe and in due course step on to the pages of literary history. She would return to her native city only twice during her 47 years of exile.
In Galway, Nora visited her mother and sisters in Bowling Green where the precocious Lucia charmed the Barnacle ladies and their neighbours with her Continental exoticism. Joyce meanwhile, feeling lonely in Trieste with their son Georgio, decided on a whim to join Nora in Galway.
They watched the regatta at Menlo, went racing in Ballybrit and sailed to the Aran Islands. Joyce was eager to see where Synge had conceived his great western plays. Joyce who was prone to sickness in Trieste, was healthy and content, even cycling to Oughterard and back.
All the while the children were fussed over by the Barnacle girls and their Uncle Tommy, a tram conductor on the Salthill route. Nora also showed the writer where she had courted Michael Bodkin, Michael Feeney and the Protestant William Mulvaghy the relationship that had so enraged her guardian.
Nora with her children visited the nuns in the Presentation Convent where she had been a laundress after leaving school at 12. The Nuns welcomed her and her children, unaware that their parents were unmarried.
Joyce and Nora married in a civil ceremony in London, after they had been living together as man and wife for nearly 27 years in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France. After Joyce’s death in Zurich in 1941, Nora decided to remain there and she died in of renal failure in 1951, at age 67
.
It took many years before the significance she played in the life of one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century was recognised. Joyce’s adult life was spent abroad, his fictional universe centred on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. But Nora was the adaptable cosmopolitan one of this couple. Nora governed a succession of unruly households in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich, holding him and the family together through the force of her own formidable pluck. Most importantly for Joyce’s work, Nora served as his “portable Ireland,” his living link to the homeland he used as the basis for his masterpieces.
His short story The Dead which was made into a film by John Huston was based on what Nora told Joyce about the two young lads whom she had courted Michael Feeney and Michael Bodkin both of whom died very young and were buried in Rahoon cemetery. Joyce wrote his poem She weeps over Rahoon which features in the Galway Poetry Trail on the entrance to the cemetery. ( My parents Tommie and Eithne Egan are also buried there).
Nora, the muse, was a down-to-earth woman whose devotion was always total and never blind, whose deep rich voice was heard in cafes across the Continent scolding her drunken husband, ”Jim, you’ve had enough.
2) Lady Augusta Gregory.
Lady Augusta GregorynéePersse 1852 – 1932 was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager.
Gregory was born at Roxborough, which was a 6,000-acre estate located between near Gort, the main house of which was later burnt down during the Irish civil war. She was educated at home, and her future career was strongly influenced by the family nurse/nanny, Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker, who introduced the young Augusta to the history and legends of the local area.
She married Sir William Gregory , a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort 1880. He was 35 years her elder, had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament for County Galway. He was a well-educated man with many literary and artistic interests, and the house at Coole housed a large library and extensive art collection, both of which Lady Gregory was eager to explore. He also had a house in London, where the couple spent a considerable amount of time, holding weekly salons frequented by many leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson John Everett Millais and Henry James.
Barely two years into her married life, and a young mother, she fell totally in love with a serial seducer, Wilfrid Scawn Blunt. The affair lasted a year, and ended by a mutual pact in the summer of 1883. On the morning after their last night together she gave him 12 perfectly composed sonnets outlining her utter passion and complete surrender to him.
Their only child, Robert, was born in 1881. He was killed during the First World war, while serving as a pilot, an event which inspired Yeats’s poems “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” and “Shepherd and Goatherd.”
With Yeats and Edward, she co-founded the Irish Literary theatre and the Abbey theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime. George Bernard Shaw , John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey. They and many others carved their initials on the Autograph Tree, an old Copper beech still standing in the walled garden today. The Yeats poem The Wild Swans at Coole was inspired by the beauty of the swans in the turlough at Coole Park. Yeats’s home at Thoor Balylee was just 3 miles away; he also wrote “Coole Park, 1929”, a poem that describes the park as a symbol for the revival of Irish literature. The “big house” at Coole was demolished in 1941. In the late 1960s, Coole was opened to the public for amenity use (which my uncle Canon Quinn was later instrumental in developing), served as an important meeting place for leading Revival figures, and her early work as a member of the board of the Abbey was at least as important for the theatre’s development as her creative writings.
Coole House
She bequeathed Arus na nGael in Dominic Street where I attended Irish dance classes in the fifties when Mrs Simpson from Athlone taught there and spawned so many dancers and choreographers like Peggy Carty and Celine Hession.
Her first publication was Poets and Dreamers (Dublin, Hodges & Figgis/London, John Murray, 1903), containing translations of Raftery, folk-tales, and translations of short plays by Douglas Hyde. This was followed by Gods and Fighting Men (With a Preface by W.B. Yeats. London, John Murray, 1904), based on mythological cycle of the Irish Kings; A Book of Saints and Wonders (1906), which narrates in Kiltartanese the lore of St Brigit, St Patrick, St Columcille, the voyages of Maeldun and Brendan, and the Old Woman of Beare.
She began writing plays by helping Yeats with the peasant dialogue of his plays and in effect co-authored his early plays, including Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Her first play was Twenty Five (Dublin, The Abbey, 1904). Altogether she wrote nineteen original plays and seven translations for the Abbey between 1904-1912, including as The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1906), The Rogueries of Scapin (1908), The Miser (1909), and The Would-Be Gentleman (1923), included in Irish Folk History Plays (1912); her comedies include Hyacinth Halvey (1906); The Image (1909); Damer’s Gold (1912), and MacDonough’s Wife (1912), written aboard ship en route to America.
She published The Kiltartan History Book (Dublin, Maunsel & Co, 1909); The Kiltartan Wonder Book (Maunsel & Co, 1910); and issued a history of the national theatre as Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter in Autobiography (New York, G. Putnam’s Sons, 1913).
On a second tour of America in 1915, she wrote Shanwalla (London, Putnam, 1915); and Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 2 vols. (New York and London, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920).
Her monologue, An Old Woman Remembers (1923), was recited by Maire O’Neill in the Abbey. Her late plays include The Story Brought By Brigid (Abbey 1923); Sancha’s Master (1927) and Dave (1927).
Landlord, nationalist, entrepreneur, stage manager, playwright, poet and patron, stoical in enduring operations for breast cancer under local anaesthetic, a woman whose life, as she said, was “a series of enthusiasms”, she died after walking for the last time through the rooms of the house she loved so much in May, 1932.
3) Rita Anne Higgins poet.
Rita Ann Higgins is a native of Ballybrit, Galway. She was one of thirteen children in a working-class household. She married in 1973 but following the birth of her second child in 1977, contracted tuberculosis, forcing her to spend an extended period in a sanatorium.
While confined, she began reading, and took to composing poems. She joined the Galway Writers’ Workshop in 1982. Jessie Lendennie, editor of Salmon Publishing, encouraged her and oversaw the publication of her first five collections.
Jessie herself is another Galway woman to be lauded as she supported, nurtured and published the poets of the city.
The first book of her poems I bought was Goddess on the Mervue Bus and I got her to autograph it when I gigged with her 20 years ago in Derry when I was performing as Sheela-na-Gig. I told her she was a comedienne but she denied it. The reference is about where I got my name – born on the feast day of St John of the Latin Gate. (probably didn’t exist as he got pushed off the calendar by St Martin De Porres on May 6th).
From her poem Ireland is changing mother.ore this mother,
your sons were Gods of that powerful thing.
Gods of the apron string.
They could eat a horse and they often did,
with your help mother.
Even Tim who has a black belt in sleepwalking
and border lining couldn’t torch a cigarette,
much less the wet haystack of desire,
even he can see, Ireland is changing mother.
Listen to black belt Tim mother.
One of Rita Anne’s poem is included in poems for Galway.
Higgins’s voices are so distinctive and real that a whole world of semi-rural Irish poverty rises around the reader with the jolting acuity of an excellent documentary…an hilarious, absorbing and thoroughly disturbing experience’– Kate Clanchy, Independent
Galway was jubilant after being awarded 2020 European City of Culture, but it is unclear if the EU jury that awarded the €1.5m prize got sight of an explosive poem about the City of the Tribes that was commissioned as part of the bid process.
But the organising committee got more than they bargained for when Rita Ann sent them her work. They had, perhaps, been expecting a paean to the many glories of Galway extolling its manifest virtues as a gateway to the Atlantic coast, and an unrepentant bastion of the arts, the native language, music, dance, theatre and literature.
What they got instead was a devastating critique in which she rips into her native city.
Ms Higgins has always been an anarchic and provocative voice, but the poem Our Killer City is perhaps her most inflammatory.
Her poem rails against the car parking charges in the city hospitals, events in the local courts, the whiff of sewage on city streets and bias against Travellers.”This is pity city, sh**ty city. Sewage in your nostrils city. This is Galway. City of expert panels. City of Slickers and slackers who name call Travellers knackers.”
And she also casts a cold and angry eye on the treatment meted out to local artists using irony and sarcasm in equal measure to describe their exclusion.
Galway’s bid to win capital of culture is all twenty twenty give the horse plenty. We’re in with a great chance. until they hear about the legionnaire’s disease outbreak in the fire station, where our life savers need saving.
The birds are tweeting about the arrival of the jury this July . The word is out they’ll rule on the bid. Best to keep them councillors out of sight, with the malarkey they go on with, in city hall. Govern, govern my arse they wouldn’t govern a sly fart on a runway. We’ll end up crowned the capital of fools. Accusations of nepotism, potassium . a host of other isms chisms, chasms and schisms. I sent you that letter by mistake said the CEO, buckling under pressure. You are not actually co-opted onto those committees , FYI, you are co-workered off .
My ogyny, your ogyny, misogyny. We laugh about it at bus stops. We say, aren’t some of our elected representatives a laughing stock. We’ll never get Capital of Culture if they look through that window.
Some people live their lives so they can die on a trolley in Galway’s A&E. Just wait and wait and wait and you’ll die waiting. Eighteen million on a new block and not a new bed in site or on site. The car park police in the hospital grounds are a culture shock unto themselves. Don’t die on a trolley in the bidding city the forbidding city before you have paid your parking or we will kill your next of kin with the weight of their parking ticket. Culture capital or no culture capital.
The swans in the canals all know, we underpay our nurses we underpay our teachers. We overpay our consultants and we don’t know why. This is fair-play city, or unfair play city if you are a woman working for years in NUIG and hoping for a promotion. Hashtag-go-Micheline-go. They’ll sue the blog off ya, but won’t they look silly, don’t they look silly. This is pity city, shitty city. Sewage in your nostrils city. This is Galway city of expert panels. City of slickers and slackers who name call Traveller s’ knackers.
If you want the odour of outrage ask the students at GMIT who have to re-sit exams. Allegations of cheating. Oh no not this again. They are coming in July to rule on the bid. We’ll hide that bit of news about the GMIT and the gender discrimination in NUIG In the parlour that never gets used, to that we’ll throw the new block, the bedless block at University Hospital Galway.
This is Galway slicker and slacker. Have your home burgled by your favourite nephew, while you are at his other aunts funeral. He didn’t know it was her house and he didn’t know taking her jewelery without her permission was stealing.
This is Galway the bidding City the forbidding city. Where the woman in court apologised to her man for putting him through this. The judge asked her, did he apologise to you when he was sticking that screwdriver in your forehead? No but he wasn’t feeling himself that day your honour. Someone in City hall, not a councillor this time, is yowling about the capital of culture bid. If the bid book isn’t ready on time says the yowler, I’ll send you all to the fire station or the picture palace. She is pepping and prepping and side stepping. Her side -kick got side kicked. No impact. Complaining is the devils work. Stick in a few more theatres’ there that we don’t have, stick in a gallery or two. How will they know if it’s true? How will they know if it’s not true?
This is Galway, city of tools. A man brings a cleaver into hospital with him. The judge coming down with a migraine, reached into her bag a yokes. What got into you, she said, pleading with the plaintiff? I heard the chops were tough your honour, nothing more, nothing less. But you were seen chasing the back of a poor man’s head, with a cleaver. It wasn’t me your honour, and he wasn’t poor.
What about local artists? Someone dared to ask, not the yowler from city hall or her side-kicked side-kick. To hell with local artists what do they bring the city? nothing but scruffy dogs and ripped jeans, hippies with hobbies the lot of them. As for the buskers, wanting to fit in with the odor of outrage. Move them on, hide them in GMIT, or the picture palace. Don’t mention local artists at all. Let it be like they don’t exist Raise the rents is the best way to keep the ripped jeans gang out, like it’s always been. Artists me arse. This is Galway, the bidding city the forbidding city. City of thieves or is scribes or is it tribes? The jury are coming this July, the word is out they’ll rule on the bid, for capital of Culture twenty twenty give the horse plenty. We have a great little city here, a pity little city, a shitty little city.
‘Tongulish, her 11th book of poetry, finds Higgins as intensively inventive and deliciously subversive as ever… The rebellious, innovative Higgins is one of his [James Joyce’s] distinctive heirs. Like Joyce, she knows just how to beat up the English language and her use of mythology, Irish language and Ireland’s past put her own inimitable stamp on her bang up-to-date present.’ – Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Rita Anne- Galway’s prolific and honest bard-should become our poet Laureate some day.
"Exuding a certain laid-back confidence, she takes the sit-down, Dave Allen approach to comedy, but her show packs as much punch as the strutting style of most male stand-ups." Gill Roth THE LIST.
I have been a Humanist Celebrant for 22 years and a Humanist and atheist since my teens. I was brought up in Catholic Ireland, attended convent schools, had an uncle a priest and my mother’s cousin was Edel Quinn, a missionary, who is on a waiting list for canonisation. By the time I emigrated I was not a religious believer and realised that religion was made up by men and deeply misogynistic. Like many people brought up in the religion of their parents I rejected it. The 
Humanist funerals and memorials celebrate the person who has died and usually includes their lifestory and thoughts and memories from their family and friends. This is usually written up by the family/friends after talking through their loved one’s life after a visit, through phonecalls and emails.
Almost immediately a meeting was held with the help of John Burns Battersea MP, the Commissioners of Lunacy proclaimed her sane though “foolish” and released her.
Mary ran a soup kitchen for the children of the dock strike, initiated the Socialist Sunday School movement in 1892. Her aim, on realising they had little or no education, was to influence and educate them and make them aware of their socialist responsibilities and provide what was lacking in their day schools. She began teaching them about the causes and consequences of poverty. The idea caught the imagination and more than 200 Socialist Sunday Schools had been set up in the UK by 1914 and the concept became international. Socialist parents sent their children to the schools to ensure they were politically-aware.
Isabella should be remembered for her own deeds and not be tagged to her brother William but this was written in the early sixties!
and Millicent Garrett Fawcett is due to have one unveiled in Parliament Square this year 2018 – the centenary year of Votes for Women. This will be the first statue there commemorating a woman and by a woman sculptor Gillian Wearing.
of Battersea House who founded the De Morgan Collection of her sister Evelyn’s work and brother-in-law William ceramicist author.
was born in London in 1865, Anna Maria Diana Wilhelmina Pickering was the youngest daughter of Anna Maria Wilhelmina Spencer-Stanhope and her husband, Percival Andree Pickering, Q.C. (1810-1876). She was the younger sister of Evelyn De Morgan. Over her lifetime Mrs Stirling assembled a substantial art collection that featured their work. When she died at the age of ninety-nine in 1965, she bequeathed her collection to be looked after in Trust for perpetuity.
Jun
The bookshop began to gain an international reputation. Maureen was the one constant in all of this growth and artists and writers from all over the world came to meet her and to avail of her vast knowledge of Irish interest material. As John McGahern once said “Mrs Kenny misses nothing”. One of her great gifts was her phenomenal memory as she would report the arrival of out of print books books to people who had asked for them years before. As one customer said: “who needs amazon.com when you have Mrs Kenny?”
Our mother was conferred with an honorary degree by UCG. Part of her citation read: “She and all she stands for remained a constant when virtually everything around her had disappeared, been redeveloped or surrendered to more perishable, transient tastes. Her metier represents one that is entwined with Galway’s history”. In 2006, she retired after 66 years behind the counter.
is a botanist and plant ecologist who was a lecturer in Galway University. She has also become a champion of women’s equality by challenging the University for gender discrimination when she won a landmark case against her former employer of 34 years, NUI Galway. The Equality Tribunal found that the university had discriminated against the botanist for promotion because of her gender.
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Activists from the brilliant feminist performance group 
sheelanagigcomedienne
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