Tipperary Studies

 

Biographical Studies

 

Some students might find it of value and perhaps easier to research some aspect of an individual’s life and career.  There is a section in Finding Tipperary called “Remarkable Individuals” indicating published sources about interesting Tipperary lives, from famous figures such as Bianconi and “Woodcock” Carden to the less well known such as Aileen Cust and Anna Doyle Wheeler. Detailed bibliographical information can be found there.  Below is a small selection of lives, possible topics and some sources.

 

Sir William Butler (1838-1910)

Butler served in the British army and was involved in many colonial wars, from Canada, to West Africa, to the Sudan and Egypt and finally South Africa just before the Boer War.  He was a catholic and supported Home Rule.  A student could look at any one of these episodes, for example his involvement in the effort to relieve Gordon in Khartoum.  Butler’s career connects Irish history and British colonialism.  There is an autobiography and two biographies, the more recent and better, published in 2003.

Butler’s wife was the famous painter Elizabeth Butler and she wrote an autobiography (1922) as did their daughter Eileen Gormanston (1953).

 

John O’Leary (1830-1907)

No shortage of topics, examples include his involvement with Kickham in producing the Fenian newspaper Irish People; his role in the IRB; his relationship with Yeats.  Sources include his own memoir Fenians & Fenianism (1896); Marcus Bourke’s biography (1967) and Owen McGee’s The IRB (2005)

 

Joseph K. Bracken (1852-1904) and Brendan Bracken (1901-1958)

This Templemore father and son make so odd a contrast that their lives, if in fiction, would seem ridiculous.  The father, who was at the founding meeting of the GAA, is best understood through Nancy Murphy’s article in Nolan & McGrath, Tipperary: History & Society (Dublin, 1985) and some material published to mark his centenary.  His son, close associate of Churchill and wartime minister is examined in two biographies, Boyle (1974) and Lysaght (1979).  A student could look at the father’s career in relation to Irish Ireland or the son’s role in sustaining Churchill through the “wilderness years”.  (The 2002 Albert Finney movie The Gathering Storm and an earlier TV. series The Wilderness Years features this relationship).  A more ambitious topic might be to compare how the two men demonstrated very different notions of Irishness.

 

The Cormack Brothers were executed in Nenagh in 1858 for the murder of a land agent. Popular opinion never accepted their guilt and in 1910 their bodies were exhumed and reburied.  Their lives could be looked at in different contexts such as the nature of agrarian crime, the land war in the area or more ambitiously, as an exercise in the relationship between history and memory.  Nancy Murphy’s book Guilty or Innocent?  (Nenagh, 1997) is useful and Tipperary Studies has a file of material about the exhumation.  Press coverage was extensive.

 

John Sadleir (1813-1856)

Any life that resulted in large-scale misery for others is likely to be interesting, not to mention a life that Dickens found fascinating enough to put in his fiction.  Jim O’Shea’s biography is definitive and points the way towards accessible newspaper sources.  Sadleir’s “Life and Times” is a non-starter for students but a study of how his bank and its collapse impacted on a particular community, would be of great interest.  More generally, his career could be looked at for what it demonstrates about the economic recovery after the Famine.

 

Charles J. Kickham offers the more able student an opportunity to examine changing attitudes.  The focus of a study rather than being the life and times of Kickham, could note the various biographies and see how they reflected attitudes of the periods when they were written.  Bringing this up to date, Tipperary Historical Journal (2007) has an article looking at Kickham’s writings from a feminist perspective.  Finding Tipperary has a listing of the Kickham biographies and related studies.

 

 

Women’s Lives

Some students might find this of interest.  Not surprisingly, women’s lives have been hidden but this is changing.  Sources are available casting light on a wide variety of experiences.

 

Aileen Cust (1868-1937) was born and brought up near Tipperary town and was the first woman in the U.K. to qualify as a vet.  See C.M. Ford (1990)

 

Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1849) lived in Ballywire in Aherlow before she ran away from an abusive husband and became an important figure in promoting ideas about female equality.  Her daughter married the famous Victorian novelist Bulwer Lytton and wrote in a fragment of autobiography:  “The first mistake I made was being born at all.” – An interesting family!  For a summary see T. Duddy (ed.), Dictionary of Irish Philosophers (Bristol, 2004) pp.368-71; also Dolores Dooley, Equality in Community (1996) and the same writer’s sketch in Cullen & Luddy (eds.), Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin, 1995).

 

Dorothea Herbert (1770-1806) a clergyman’s daughter kept a famous diary and describes vividly the kind of world Jane Austen might have evoked if she lived in Carrick-on-Suir.  See her Retrospections (Dublin, 2004 paperback ed.).  An interesting comparison could be made with the totally different kind of life in the same part of the county a century or so later, lived by

 

Bridget Cleary (1869-1895) whose murder by her husband who believed her to be changling was the sensation of the decade.  See Angela Bourke (1999) Cleary’s life could be looked at for what it showed about rural life at odds with change and modernity.  There was extensive newspaper coverage.  (Another study by two American ladies The Cooper’s Wife is Missing (New York, 2000) is dreadful.)

 

Marjorie Quarton (b.1930) was born in Nenagh and her Breakfast the Night Before (Dublin, 2000) has a lot of social history about a certain kind of horsey life in North Tipperary.  This contrasts with the life described by

 

Mary Healy (b.1912) who was in domestic service in South Tipperary.  See her For the Poor and for the Gentry (Dublin, 1989).

 

Agnes Veronica Ryan (1890-1971) was a neighbour and friend of Sean Treacy.  She became a very successful business woman, unique for the period.  See her biography by I.M. Ni Riain (Author, [1986])

 

Cumann na mBan played a role in the War of Independence and two of the Bureau of Military History witness statements relate to women’s contribution, that of

 

Mrs M.A. McGrath (W.S. 1704) and Mrs Bridget Ryan (W.S. 1488).  McGrath’s evidence relates to the Clonmel area and that of Ryan to Thurles and district.  Ryan for example describes the visit to Thurles of Mrs Philip Snowdon as part of a Labour Party fact-finding tour (her husband was later Chancellor of the Exchequer). 

Generally see Cal McCarthy, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution, 1914-23  (Cork, 2007).

 

 

last updated on: Tuesday, 03-Aug-2010 15:37:59 IST