Padraig Pearse

paky wrote: »

I was just looking at Padraig Pearses court matial address on the National Libray of Ireland's 1916 exhibit. Its quite an address, he comes across as a great orator but what I wanted to know was Pearse as influential in person as he was in writing?
Alot of stuff I briefly read about Pearse is that he was a romantic and a weak individual. Is this true?

Madam, - I would like to draw your readers' attention to inaccurate references to the first family of James Pearse, father of Patrick Pearse, in an otherwise interesting and informative piece by James Fitzgerald on the new exhibition in the Pearse Museum, formerly St Enda's, Rathfarnham (The Irish Times, December 30th).
James Pearse had in fact two surviving children from his first marriage, Emily and James Vincent and not "two extra daughters by his first wife".
James Vincent was my grandfather. I was a frequent visitor to St Enda's and spent my holidays there in the 1940s with Patrick Pearse's sister Senator Margaret Pearse, my godmother. Both Emily's and …



http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-24775963.html

Monumental sculpture workshop, of 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin. After the death of JAMES PEARSE his business was carried on for a few years under the name James Pearse & Sons by his younger son, the sculptor William Pearse (1881-1916), with some assistance from his more famous elder son, the lawyer, teacher and patriot Patrick Pearse (1879-1916). The business was still extant in 1908 but probably came to an end soon afterwards, as William began to become involved in teaching art at his brother's schools. Both Patrick and William were executed for their part in the Easter Rising of 1916.

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Building: CO. MAYO, BALLINA, CATHEDRAL OF ST MUIREDACH (RC) Date: 1892;1893;1894; Nature: Lady altar, 1892; communion rails, 1893; font, 1894; Holy Family altar, 1900. Refs: Designs formerly in office archives of W.H. Byrne & Son
Building: CO. MEATH, TRIM, PATRICK STREET, CHURCH OF ST PATRICK (RC) Date: 1901 Nature: Reredos. Refs: Christine Casey & Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster (1993), 518
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WILLIAM STREET NORTH, CHURCH OF ST AGATHA (RC) Date: 1907;1908 Nature: William Malone and Pearse & Sons sign agreements to carry out high altar design (by W.H.Byrne?), 1907, altar rails and side altar, 1908. Refs: IAA, W.H. Byrne & Son drawings collection, Acc. 2006/142
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WILLIAM STREET NORTH, CHURCH OF ST AGATHA (RC) Date: 1908 Nature: Design for side altar by Pearse & Sons and William Malone. Refs: Drawing in W.H. Byrne & Son collection
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WESTLAND ROW, ST ANDREW'S CHURCH (RC) Date: 1912p Nature: Statue of Mater Dolorosa in mortuary chapel by William Pearse. Refs: Catholic Dublin: a guide (1932); Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century (1996), 389
Building: CO. DONEGAL, LETTERKENNY, CATHEDRAL OF ST EUNAN (RC) Date: ? Nature: Pulpit and altar rail by 'Pearse & Co'. Refs: Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North West Ulster (1979), 343
Building: CO. LIMERICK, LIMERICK, CATHEDRAL PLACE, CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN (RC) Date: ? Nature: Reredos by William Pearse. Refs: Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century (1996), 389
Building: CO. MEATH, KILMESSAN, CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY OF MARY (RC) Date: ? Nature: Altar furniture. Refs: Christine Casey & Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster (1993), 364

The present High Altar in Youghal was erected in 1886 and was made by Pearse of Dublin. An account oft he event is to be found in the quondam Cork Examiner for 14 November 1886. The Telford organ was first played for High Mass celebrated by Bishop Keane on 23 May 1858.

The diaries that split Padraig Pearse's family apart
The publication of Pearse's diaries by his sister Mary Bridget in 1934 led to a life-long rift with her older sister Margaret, writes Harry McGee
A BITTER dispute over the personal diaries of Patrick Pearse led to a lifelong estrangement between the two sisters of the executed Easter Rising leader.

Pearse's youngest sister, Mary Bridget, published The Home Life of Patrick Pearse in 1934 which was based on Patrick's personal diaries about his childhood. However, her decision to publish the book outraged her sister Margaret, who claimed that his diary belonged to both of them. It led to a protracted legal dispute between the sisters which, at one stage, necessitated the intervention of Eamon de Valera who suggested arbitration. The dispute deteriorated the already hostile relationship between the two women and neither were reconciled at the time of Mary Bridget's death 13 years later.

The two sisters and their mother, Margaret, are the subjects of a Léargas documentary for RTE which traces the lives of the three women and their relationships with Patrick and his brother Willie, both executed in the wake of the 1916 rising.

The programme ? which features contributions from Pearse biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards as well as historians Séamus Ó Buachalla, Pádraig Ó Snodaigh and Pat Cooke, curator of St Enda's, the Pearse museum in Rathfarnham, Dublin ? examines the myth that surrounded his mother Margaret, especially, after his death.

Contributors contend that the popular image of Pearse's mother after 1916 ? an almost classical vision of pious suffering ? was one that was not of her making but rather of her son's. Awaiting his execution, Pearse wrote poetry and letters, purporting to be in her voice. Cooke says that the words of the mother grieving her two dead sons ? evoking a vision of Cáitlín Ní hUallacháin grieving for Ireland ? belonged directly to Patrick and not to her.

Contemporary accounts say that she spent the week following the execution wandering the streets of Dublin looking for her two sons. However, the letters enabled her to cope after the execution with their admonition to be proud and not sad. Thereafter, Margaret became a living symbol of her dead sons, becoming a member of the Senate and travelling to the US to raise funds for St Enda's school.

The Pearse family was a classic Victorian family, upwardly mobile in Dublin at the turn of the century. Margaret was 18 when she became the second wife of James Pearse, a stone sculptor from Liverpool. Margaret was not an intellectual but she had a warm and loving personality. From an early age it was clear that Patrick, born in 1879, was the most gifted member of the family and the roles of his mother and siblings became supportive ones for his endeavours.

Mary Bridget, who suffered from depression, did not endear herself to nationalists after she reportedly told Patrick to come home and not be foolish during the siege in the GPO.

After his death, his mother effectively changed from being housekeeper to manager of St Enda's, a role later taken on by Margaret Jnr. The school closed in 1935 but Margaret remained living alone in the enormous tumbledown house for many years. She died in 1968.

The extent of the rift between the sisters can be seen in correspondence during the dispute in the 1930s when Mary Bridget wrote to Margaret saying: "Your case is not worrying me. It is yourself who is worrying me. Why don't you leave me alone and stop harrying me."
February 3, 2002

http://www.tribune.ie/article/2002/feb/03/the-diaries-that-split-padraig-pearses-family-apar/

CDfm wrote: »

Was that this guy

To what has been handed down to the family, Patriag,(Patrick) William(Willie )Margaret Anne, and Mary Bridget - by James and Margaret of a second Marriage. The first marriage was to Emily Fox, she had two children to James, James Vincent and Mary Emily., after the birth of Mary Emily she died, thus causing James to seek a new wife...I am not sure of this but it was said that she died in childbirth, leaving the question wide open to wonder whether Mary Emily & Mary Bridget are one and the same , relatives dispute this, however it is one part of the family history I have put aside and left and I do not ever mention it when others bring it up because it has caused too many problems in the past when my father and his brothers were alive,and again, it has done so again in the descending generations. I have been working on this family history for 20 years, and I just cannot believe people think the way they do, so best to leave well enough alone.

The younger James Vincent returned to England after the uprising, leaving father to carry many works in Ireland in memory of his sons. He had his favourite,young Willie. It is said that he never forgave himself for what happened. I suppose he thought that he could have done more, as we all do even today, you have to admit many of us think the same way when put in a similar situation of something that has happened in our lives.

Margaret apparently ended up in Politics, I have never followed it through... I have never forgotten the situation I was put in one night at a St. Patricks Day celebration by an Irish Priest. I was taking photos for the the job I was in , however he knew part of the history, and then he turned around to the people seated, mind you this was a few hundred had turned out for the occasion, and over the microphone he is a lady who is a descendant of the uprising in Ireland, I have never forgotten it , because you could have cut the air with a knife, immediately he realized he had done the wrong thing, it was plain to see I was not welcome.
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William (Willie)James Pearse born November 15,1881 at 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, he was the younger brother of Patrick Pearse.
William inherited his father's artistic abilities and became a sculptor. He was educated at the Christian Brothers School, Westland Row. He studied at the Metropolitan Shcool of Art in Dublin under Oliver Sheppard. He also studied art in Paris. While attending the Kensington School of Art he gained notice for several of his artworks. Some of his sculptures were to be found in:

Limerick Cathedral, St. Eunan's, Letterkenny and several Dublin churches including Terenure His well known figure of "The Mater Dolorosa" in Mortuary Chapel, St. Andrews Westland row appears a tragic and prophetic masterpiece. Throughout the countryside you may find his sculptures of the Dead Christ and the Immaculate Conception. The O'Mulrennan Memorial in Glasnevin and a memorial to Father Murphy in Wexford are also his works.

Residents of a house 16 in Spencer Street (North Dock, Dublin)
Show all information
Surname Forename Age Sex Relation to head Religion
Pearse Agnes 6 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Emily 12 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Margaret 4 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Florence 10 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse James 34 Male Head of Family R Catholic
Pearse Henry 1 Male Son R Catholic
Pearse James 8 Male Son R Catholic
Pearse Mary 35 Female Wife R Catholic

Residents of a house 363 in Sandymount Avenue (Part of) (Pembroke East & Donnybrook, Dublin)
Show all information
Surname Forename Age Sex Relation to head Religion
Pearse William James 19 Male Brother Roman Catholic
Pearse Patrick Henry 21 Male Head of Family Roman Catholic
Pearse Margaret 44 Female Mother Roman Catholic
Pearse Mary Brigid 16 Female Sister Roman Catholic
Pearse Margaret Mary 22 Female Sister Roman Catholic
Doody Honor 65 Female Visitor Roman Catholic

In 1877, James married his Irish-born second wife, Margaret Brady, a nineteen year old girl who worked in a local stationer’s shop he frequented. Her family originally hailed from an Irish-speaking district of County Meath and had been forced by the disastrous effects of the Great Famine to migrate to the Dublin in search of work. There they had become moderately successful eventually coming to hold several pieces of property in a working class area of the city, where Margaret was born. She was several years younger than her husband when he met her and despite her family’s initial reluctance to see her marry someone so recently widowed, with two children and somewhat older than her the wedding eventually went ahead.

Though they seemed to have had a close relationship one would expect that there must have been some difficulties between the children of James Pearse’s first and second wives. With their mother gone at a relatively early age the two children of Emily Susanna Pearse were suddenly given a new mother and soon new half-sisters and brothers (and eventually even a new ‘Irish’ spelling for their surname). These things must have been traumatic for the children of James’s first wife.

Furthermore their father blamed their late mother for the death in childhood through ‘neglect’ of one of their two deceased siblings, which cannot have helped things. Nevertheless all the evidence we have indicates that Margaret was a good mother to her two step-children and that the half-siblings remained in close contact throughout their lives even after the older two had left the family home, James Pearse to a career and marriage in Britain where he remained for the rest of his life and Emily Pearse to a marriage with Alfred McGloughlin, the son of her father’s close friend John McGloughlin and a life in Dublin. Her son, Alfred McGloughlin Jr, became a close childhood companion of Pádraig’s.

The family had a strong Republican tradition rooted in their Irish speaking character. Pádraig’s great-great-grandfather, Uaitéar Ó Brádaigh (Walter Brady), had fought in the 1798 Rising as a member of the Irish Republican and revolutionary Society of the United Irishmen, who were led by local Presbyterian and Republican radicals. Uaitéar’s brother had been executed by British after fighting in the bloody Battle of Tara (in which Uaitéar himself had probably fought), and was buried in the famous Croppies’ Grave at Tara, while another brother was captured and hanged by the Yeomanry, a feared British and Loyalist militia in Ireland. Uaitéar’s son, also named Uaitéar (Walter Brady Junior), was forced with his large family from their home at An Obair in 1848, one of the worse years of the Great Famine and also the year of the Young Irelander Rising, another Irish Republican insurrection that sprang out in several areas of the country and lasted until 1849. It is probable that Uaitéar’s son, Pádraig Ó Brádaigh (the grandfather of Pádraig Mac Piarais, who spoke only Irish), was a member of the Irish Confederate Clubs as the Young Irelanders were officially known, in his youth

One of the earliest biographies of Pádraig was by the renowned Breton nationalist writer and journalist Louis N. Le Roux who was in exile in Ireland during the latter part of the Irish Revolution and mixed widely in Irish Republican circles. His popular French language biography of Pádraig, ‘L'Irlande militante: la vie de Patrick Pearse, avec une introduction historique et 15 photographies’, was published in 1932 and was based on numerous personal interviews and research he carried out after returning to live in Ireland in 1930, where he lodged with Kathleen Clarke, the widow of Tom Clarke, the dominant leader of the Easter Rising ...........– tragically he was killed in London during a World War II air raid). There Pádraig and Éibhlín’s relationship is stated as a simple matter-of-fact:

‘It is true that before he reached his 30th year he had felt attracted towards a young girl - Éibhlín Nichols - a UCD graduate, as ardent a patriot as himself, and as true a Gael and as fair as any colleen could be. Her courage was equal to his own and, she, too, was drawn towards him. The young woman was an expert swimmer and she one day dived into the sea at the Blasket Islands to save a girl from drowning. Through her gallant act the girl was saved, but she herself perished in the stormy and treacherous waves. At her funeral some of the bystanders bore away the memory of the grief in the face of Pearse and the tears in his eyes.’

Another witness to the romance between Pádraig and Éibhlín was Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, the sister of Seosamh Pluincéid (Joseph Plunkett).

...... Grace Evelyn Gifford, in a cell in Mountjoy Gaol on the eve of his execution by firing squad in 1916 while Tomás Mac Donnchadha was married to Grace’s sister Muriel Gifford in 1912, both girls coming from an Anglo-Irish family with a Catholic father and Protestant mother and raised as Protestants (Tomás was introduced to his future wife by a close suffragette friend). Geraldine Plunkett Dillon and her bother grew up in Ráth Maonais (Rathmines, Co. Dublin) not far from where Éibhlín grew up and Geraldine knew Éibhlín and the Nicolls family very well, and later stated that Éibhlín’s brother Seoirse had admitted to her that Pádraig had proposed to Éibhlín but that she had turned him down because,

‘she did not want to abandon her mother to the problems…in her home’.

Though we cannot know for sure what the problems were it seems likely that there was a drink problem in the family (so Geraldine certainly presumed) and that she did not wish to leave her mother to deal with that problem alone. One possible victim of this problem may have been Éibhlín’s father, who was certainly associated with the temperance movement at the time of her death. In a statement made by Fr Paul, a member of the Capuchins of Church Street at the memorial meeting for Éibhlín held in the Mansion House on 8 September and presided over by the Lord Mayor:

‘He said he only knew the young lady by her successes as a scholar; but it was a satisfaction to him to know that one of his best and oldest friends was her worthy father, Mr. A. J. Nicolls, and the Fr Matthew Hall might be said to be in a large extent associated with his honoured name in his exertions to perpetuate the good work of Fr Matthew.'

I was born in the city of Dublin on 10 November, 1879. My father was an Englishman. My grandfather and grandmother on my father's side were, I assume, born in London, but my grandfather's family was certainly of Devonshire origin. The three children of the marriage (my father and his elder and younger brothers) were born in London, my father's birthday being the 8 December, 1839. While the children were young the family removed to Birmingham. My father was a sculptor, and had, as it were, only drifted to Ireland; but Ireland was to become his home, and, through his children, his name was to become an Irish name.

It had long been her desire that my mother's first boy - for my mother was her favourite niece, as my grandfather was her favourite brother - should be called after that beloved brother. So it was decided that my name should be Patrick. The name of Henry was added, after my father's youngest brother..

On my mother's side I can go back to a great-great grand-father, Walter Brady of Nobber in the county Meath, a Cavanman by origin. He fought in '98, and one of his brothers was hanged by the Yeos; another lies buried in the Croppy's Grave at Tara. His son, Walter, my great grandfather, married Margaret O'Connor, who had five sons, and three daughters - Catherine, Phil, Anne, Patrick, Larry, Christy, John and Margaret.

I remember, my grand-uncle Phil as a patriarchal man, whom I regarded with awe on account of his mighty age. My grand-uncle Christy was the youngest of the brothers. He had beautiful horses, and drove with all the pride of a Meath yeoman's son to Baldoyle and Fairyhouse. He had wide fields, which I remember white and fragrant with hawthorn. To spend a day at Uncle Christy's was always an event in our lives. He had married a Wicklow woman - a double Keogh - and great was their generosity, and great the cheer of their table and hearth. I know many Irish words which I first learned from my Uncle Christy, his voice had a ring, and his eyes a humour that I have never known in any other man's.
My grandfather was a very different man to my uncle Christy. He was taller and gentler, and less successful in life. His place was smaller, and his cattle and horses were fewer. The bad year of '79 - the year in which I was born - hit him hard., But his temper was so placid, his manhood so true ands fine, that far greater reverses than those which came to him could not have brought any bitterness into his life, or have affected the charitableness of his spirit. He never to my knowledge, said a hard word about anybody.
My grandfather had married Brigid Savage, a Fingal woman, who was the best step-dancer of her day in the North County. Their children were Walter, Brigid, Catherine and Margaret. This Margaret, daughter of Patrick son of Walter, son of Walter, was my mother. Of my grandfather I shall speak again, for I spent part of my childhood in his house; and I shall have to speak too, of his youngest sister, Margaret, my fosterer and teacher.

Before my half-sister had gone away she had taught my sister Maggie and me our letters., We both learned quickly; so quickly that I have no recollection of any effort on my part, or of any difficulty that beset my path through the Spelling Book. Soon I knew it all; from the alphabet in which A was the Ass, and K was the King, and Q was the Queen, and X was Xerxes, and Z was the Zebra, down to the Boy and the Wolf - a story which frightened me, and which I disliked because it was in very small print. When my half-sister sent us the great scrapbook, we were able to read the legends under all the pictures with the greatest ease, and then to learn them by name as well as by sight - Prince Greatheart and the Giant Despair and all their heroic or gigantic kin.

About this time my half-sister (for my father was a widower with a son James and a daughter Emily when he married my mother) was married to Alfred MacGloughlin, an architect. Her wedding was a very magnificent affair. My sister was her little bridesmaid, and I was her little page. I held up her train as she walked from the carriage into the church.
At the wedding breakfast we had apple pie. I thought they ought not to have put us children at a separate table;' but when Auntie Margaret came to sit with us, I was content. Willie made an outcry, during the meal, for pie, and I felt wounded when they laughed at him. I was always wounded when Willie was slighted or ill-used.

wolfpawnat wrote: »

Wow CDfm, fair dues on the research!