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That Irishman on the Terrace.

Barry O’Brien, biographer of Parnell, relates a conversation in the smoking room of the House of Commons. Parnell admits, ‘I am no match for him [Gladstone] … he knows more moves on the board than I do’.

He then paused; an Irish member entered from the Terrace. Parnell, shaking the ashes from a cigar, looked at  him, adding quickly, with an arch smile, ‘But he thinks he is a match for Mr Gladstone’.

Barry O’Brien takes care to conceal the identities of many of his colleagues.  Was this Irish member O’Connor Power?

R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Parnell, p.323 (1910).

Birthdays

Charles Stewart Parnell, deeply superstitious and depressive, dreaded his birth month, October, ‘a month of influence’.  Gladstone, a workaholic, assessed the year’s achievements in December, the month he was born. O’Connor Power, with Hibernian flair,  marked his birthday, 13 February.

See ‘February 13th 1893’, The Speaker.

Also That Irishman, pp.232-234.

The Occasional Speaker

‘The Occasional Speaker’ is a chapter in The Making of an Orator.  O’Connor Power cites a speech of the Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, at the Royal Academy banquet 1903, as an example of ‘unconventional oratory …  breezy humour thinly veiling the serious purpose’.*

Sir John Fisher (1841-1920) modernised and rebuilt the Royal Navy, replacing wooden boats with steel-plated battleships and introducing torpedoes and submarines.  He is a towering figure  in British naval history.

Fisher outlawed flogging on his ships.  In 1904 he was First Sea Lord.

* The Making of an Orator, pp. 271-274.

13th December 1892

The Daily Graphic, Thursday 15th December 1892, devoted its front page to the Johnson Club’s commemorative supper at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese tavern off Fleet Street.

Tuesday 13 December was the 108th anniversary of Dr Johnson’s death. A brief text relates, ‘The rules of the club do not admit of any reporter being present at their meetings, but our artist was permitted to record as much as he could see through the smoke over the punch bowl.’

The presiding Prior claimed there was no record of Dr Johnson visiting the Cheshire Cheese, ‘but an eloquent gentleman present, an Irish ex-M.P., pointed out that when Dr. Johnson acted on his famous suggestion, “Let us take a walk down Fleet Street”, the Cheshire Cheese must of necessity have been included among his places of call.’

The detailed illustration depicts a candle-lit, smoke-filled room. A portrait of Dr Johnson on the far wall,  the steak pudding encased in a huge basin, the claret punch bowl with its long-tailed silver spoon and the steaming thick glasses enhance the mood. Some of the Brethren, a band of brothers, are smoking the traditional eighteenth century churchwarden long clay pipes.

There were thirty-one members in the club. Just fifteen have been sketched and named. A E Fletcher, editor of the Daily Chronicle, the leading Liberal newspaper, presides at the head of the table. Mr Augustine Birrell, Ireland’s Chief Secretary (1907-1916), and Mr John O’Connor (Long John six foot six of treason felony), a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, are flanking and almost aligned with a grey-haired, bearded man who has his back to the artist. He is smoking a cigar, left hand to his brow, a thinker.* Towards the centre of the web, a ring master, he remains anonymous.

The Johnsonians were in particularly good spirits. The Liberal party was back in government and Gladstone was poised to introduce the Second Home Rule Bill 13 February 1893, O’Connor Power’s forty-seventh birthday.

 

See That Irishman, Part Three, At Large. See also Post, Selected Writings, FEBRUARY 13TH 1893, pp. 167-169.  Available to download.

*”The traveller at once raised his left hand to his left eyebrow.’  Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear,  Part Two.   A Fenian  salute, an inversion of the military salute. John McMurdo/ Birdie Edwards/Jack Douglas was a cigar smoker.

The artist was F Carruthers Gould, Prior of the Johnson Club in 1890, ‘He has also sometimes :used a pencil  for our amusement and gratification.’

The image is available to view at Post The Johnson Club, December 13, 1892.

The Johnson Club in the twenty first century:

… the original club goes on its own private way, mostly discreet shakers and movers, especially senior civil servants …

Seamus Heaney RIP

In 2011 I wrote to the great poet to point out that John O’Connor Power was ‘A witty profound Irishman’ in his friend Ted Hughes poem, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’.*

Two days later I was in the kitchen preparing vegetables when my mobile rang.  Immediately I recognised his warm, heart-melting brogue. A sink-side conversation followed with my favourite Irishman on my favourite subject.

*See FAQs

Soft Power

The motive of personal gain is one of the lowest motives of human conduct; but your so-called law of competition has nothing else to appeal to, and the race is dwarfed and demoralised by its operation.  I hold, on the contrary, that the individual is capable of still greater exertion from the nobler motive of benefiting the race, and that we must construct a society in which selfishness is openly discredited if we would secure the highest development of the powers of the individual, and of the faculties of the human mind.

The Gospel of Wealth (A reply to Mr. Andrew Carnegie), The Universal Review, 1890, 353.

In 1892, Andrew Carnegie was asked to resign his membership of the National Liberal Club. He had taken a leading role in the Homestead strike, an industrial lockout in Pennsylvania.

Irish Nationalist and Johnsonian Robert Lynd.

Lingering at the window of the Curiosity Shop opposite Dun Laoghaire library, I noticed a Penguin edition of ‘Dr Johnson and Company’ by Irish journalist and essayist, Robert Lynd (1879-1949).

Lynd was born in Belfast and moved to London in 1901.  He was a clubbable man,  a companion of the Cheshire Cheese, ‘fragile in his Rhymesters’ black cloak’.  He and his wife , Sylvia, a poet and novelist, entertained in great style.  He spoke at James Connolly’s funeral in 1916. He was a friend and admirer of Roger Casement.

John Lawlor – Sculptor

There is now a John Lawlor Wikipedia site.   Lawlor (c.1820-1901) was a prominent sculptor and Irish Nationalist.  He was the uncle of James Joseph O’Kelly, the Fenian parliamentarian, and Aloysius O’Kelly, the painter.

Statuary was often used as a hiding place for documents,  guns and ammunition.

Lawlor’s London home was a safe meeting place for members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.  Was it here that O’Connor Power kept his private papers?

The location of Lawlor’s bronze bust of O’Connor Power MP (1881) remains unknown.

The released prisoners and the Gaiety

On 13 January 1878, Michael Davitt, Charles McCarthy, Thomas Chambers  and John Patrick O’Brien, the released Fenian prisoners, arrived back in Ireland. They stayed in the European hotel in Dublin.

The following day they visited O’Connor Power in his lodgings in Doran’s, 10 Molesworth Street, to ‘thank him for his unceasing exertions on their behalf’.

That evening they went to the Gaiety theatre to see a production of The Shaughraun, a play by Irish nationalist, Dion Boucicault.  They occupied a box immediately opposite the Viceregal box.  They enjoyed the performance enormously.