Author: Jane Stanford

December 13th 1887

In December 1887, O’Connor Power took office as Prior of The Johnson Club ‘in that noted hostelry, the Old Cheshire Cheese’.   He proposed the customary toast – ‘The Memory of Dr Johnson’.

The ‘Eighty’ Club dined the same evening.  Lord Granville spoke on ‘The Attitude of the Opposition’. He said all leading Liberals had opposed the Act of Union and the next Liberal government would bring in Home Rule. The present administration had ‘suspended the Constitution in Ireland’. Lord Spencer declared the Irish people ‘will not give up their aspirations’.

Four days later, O’Connor Power left Liverpool on board the Gallia Cunard.  He arrived in New York 27 December and stayed at the Albermarle Hotel on Broadway.

Property Valuation

I was back again in the Valuation Office and the General Registry Office.  The Field Book, 1838, describes Ballygill, a townland three miles from Ballinasloe: flooded meadows, strong friable brown earth, well circumstanced … cold,  clayey arable, good slope and aspect … cut-away bog.

Another find for this scholar-hunter: in 1863, O’Connor Power’s Uncle John valued his Ballygill house and land at £13.0.0.   There is a note in red ink in the margin, ‘This should have been published at £8.5.0. But John wished to have a vote.’

Grand Centre

I have just re-read Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873).  One of the characters, one of ‘Lizzie’s Guests’,  is Irishman Lord George de Bruce Carruthers . He is a man about town with no visible means of income, ‘a bitter radical’.   ‘He was suspected even of republican sentiments, and ignorant men about London hinted that he was the grand centre of the British Fenians.’  The picture is complete with a full description, ‘In person he was a long-legged, long-bodied, long-faced man, with rough whiskers and a rough beard on his upper lip, but with a shorn chin. His eyes were very deep set in his head, and his cheeks were hollow and sallow, and yet he looked to be and was a powerful, healthy man.  He had large hands, which seemed to be all bone, and long arms, and a neck which looked to be long; because he so wore his shirt that much of his throat was always bare.  It was manifest enough that he liked to have good-looking women about him, and yet nobody presumed it probable that he would marry.’

Westminster Portrait, 1877.  O’Connor Power is holding a letter from Michael Davitt in Dartmoor Prison which he read aloud in the House of Commons.

Lincoln Jail – reeling through the years

O’Connor Power died shortly after de Valera’s escape from Lincoln Jail.  Just over thirty years later, in early October 1950, de Valera returned to the prison as a distinguished guest.   The Anti-Partition of Ireland League (Great Britain) hosted a dinner for the Irish leader at the Saracen’s hotel in Lincoln, and the  local newspaper, the Lincolnshire Echo, recorded the event.

O’Connor Power’s great-nephew, Russell Stanford, welcomes Dev.

De Valera had a long and close relationship with Blackrock College. Russell was educated there  alongside de Valera’s sons.

The future Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, taught latin and greek to Russell and his brother, Cuthbert.  Both boys won the classics entrance award to Trinity College Dublin. They went on to study medicine in UCD.

Russell had one of the first two NHS group practices in the UK.  His home,  Donaghadee, was an ‘open house’, renowned for generous hospitality.   See Russell’s obituary in the British Medical Journal.

See Page ‘Dev and Lincoln Jail’.

Archive of the Irish in Britain

O’Connor Power – political strategist

O’Connor Power was described as a  ‘man of mystery’, enigmatic, elusive. Behind the scenes he worked with ‘a dogged tenacity of purpose’ to forward the goal of an independent Ireland.  He anticipated Niall FitzGerald’s approach:

In this era of the adoration of celebrity, we should remember that there is no limit to what a man can achieve so long as he doesn’t care who gets the credit.

As quoted in UCD Connections Alumni Magazine, 2012

To go unnamed:  ‘It was the method of Livingstone as against the method of Stanley. The former takes the braver and the better man.’   Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door.

‘boasting , as the apostle says, is excluded.’ The Forty Years of the Johnson Club 1884-1924.

Lest we forget

O’Connor Power’s nephew, Patrick Power, born in Galway in 1896, joined the Connaught Rangers  to fight in the First World War.  He died, like many thousands of Irishmen, in France and is buried in a flower-shaped cemetery near Vimy Ridge.

A bronze memorial plaque was awarded in recognition of the death of a loved one.  It was popularly known as the Dead Man’s Penny or the Widow’s Penny.

To mark the centennial of his death, 1 June 2015, Patrick’s great-nephew, Michael Stanford, visited the grave and left an arrangement of flowers.

Superstorms

In 1888, O’Connor Power toured North America to promote Home Rule. The Great Blizzard of 1888, the Great White Hurricane, was at its height March 11- March 14.   Where did he take refuge?  A few days later, he was  guest of honour at a St Patrick’s Day dinner in Louisville, Kentucky.