Sir,—Above is a copy of a copy of a photograph that appeared in an unknown magazine entitled ‘1896 Athlone Connaught Rangers’. I acquired it from the National Army Museum, London. My great grandfather Sergeant James O’Rourke is in the picture. He served with the 1st-2nd Battalion, Connaught Rangers from 1873-1899. He was born in 1853 … Read more
Tim Carey (Collins Press) ISBN 1898256896 Entering Mountjoy jail in 1997, having spent two years researching its history for this book, the author sought to ‘step back in time’ so as to make a connection with Mountjoy’s nineteenth-century past. Peering through the spy hole of a cell in the basement of B wing, one of … Read more
Norman McMillan (Tyndall Publications, £24 pb, £42 hb) ISBN 0952597403, pb/hb ISBN? In his first encounter with Trinity College, Dublin, in 1971 the author was shown around the Physics Department, and in passing his attention was drawn to a heap of old notebooks, which he was told belonged to George Francis Fitzgerald, but it seemed … Read more
James Kelly (Four Courts Press) ISBN 1851826114 In editing sixty-two broadside gallows speeches from eighteenth century Ireland James Kelly finds himself in the company of another prolific commentator on eighteenth-century Ireland. According to the nineteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Crofton-Croker, Jonathan Swift collected and annotated printed dying speeches of Irish victims. The history of crime and punishment … Read more
Last April’s conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland at the University of Southampton, whose theme was chosen to reflect the centenary of Queen Victoria’s death, opened with a classic rendition of the music hall ditty ‘Killaloe’, written by Robert Martin, landowner, unionist and composer of popular songs and musicals. Music hall … Read more