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.’
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.’
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.
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.
O’Connor Power was in Dublin in early 1899 and spoke against the over- taxation of Ireland in the Round Room at the Mansion House. The venue is now a 21st century state-of -the -art conference centre.
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.
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.
O’Connor Power was in Italy in the spring of 1875. He was present when Henry Edward Manning was made a cardinal. And, although, as a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he was excommunicated, he had an audience with Pope Pius IX.
I took That Irishman to revisit his old haunts – London’s Fleet Street, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and the Middle Temple. A call to the Johnson House revealed that the library’s holdings will shortly be on-line.
That Irishman meets Hodge, the bronze of Dr Johnson’s cat, ‘a very fine cat indeed’.
Coincidentally, my travelling companion, William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, makes mention of Hodge twice.
My next port of call was Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a tavern unspoilt by ‘the fury of innovation’ and a favourite haunt of O’ Connor Power. The atmosphere remains warm and welcoming and I presented the manager with a copy of That Irishman.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese dining room
And so to Somerset House, former home to the Admiralty, for a delightful lunch with Sile, overlooking the Thames. She joined me on my afternoon tour of the Middle Temple. We took photographs of O’Connor Power’s chambers – 5 King’s Bench Walk (1882-7), 2 Brick Court (1888-96), 1 Essex Court (1897-1916). 2 Brick Court was a former home of Oliver Goldsmith.
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith Chambers celebrate Rumpole of the Bailey:
I made efforts to locate a bust of O’Connor Power, MP, 1881, by John Lawlor, the famous Irish sculptor. It was entered for a Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition in 1881 and then withdrawn because of political unrest. The Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Academy in London were helpful but the location of the bust remains a mystery.
That Irishman’s father, Patrick Power, was from Ballygill, just outside Ballinasloe. ‘Power’s Garden’, as it was known, was close to Ballygill Bridge.
The view of the river Suck from Ballygill Bridge.
The eighteenth century Ballygill Lodge was ’10 chains East of the river Suck’ and in ruins when O’Connor Power was a boy. Anthony Trollope’s TheLandleaguers (1883) describes a meet for the local hunt in Ballytowngal.
A visit in late September to Kilmainham Gaol. O’Connor Power was arrested in Dublin in February 1868, a few days after his twenty-second birthday. He was released in July.
Kilmainham cell
Photographs of a prison cell in the Victorian East Wing. That Irishman spent several months in this cell or in one just like it.
Cell interior.
‘Home Rule sun rising up in the northwest’ James Joyce, Ulysses.
As the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council representative for Connacht, O’Connor Power moved to Mayo. The Fenians campaigned for Catholic landlord George Henry Moore in the Westminster elections. It was at meetings in Moorehall that Moore and Fenian leaders agreed on a new departure – constitutional and physical force Nationalists to work together and separately to forward the goal of an independent Ireland.
For an account of the Moores of Moorehall visit www.historicalballinrobe.com. There are photos of Moorehall in all its nineteenth century glory.
Moorehall as it is today.
Writer George Moore’s ‘dreaming house’. In 1923, Moorehall, with its impressive library, was gutted by fire.
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.
