Desmond Williams (1908–1970), a director of the Williams Group of companies spent over thirty years with the company in promoting Tullamore Dew whiskey, Irish Mist liqueur and the company’s wine distribution network. He died prematurely in 1970 at the height of the sales decade for Irish Mist with exports to over 100 countries.
Liam C. Martin was born in Kilbeggan in 1934 so he must have known all about the Locke’s distillery in that town and the associated distilling history of the Williams family in Tullamore. In about 1980 he was commissioned by the Williams Group and the late Edmund Williams to record the Williams buildings in Tullamore for posterity. The drawings were printed in an issue of about 25 copies and presented in a specially printed folder. There are some of the drawings in Offaly Archives and complete sets in private collections. It was the act of a far seeng man to have the legacy recorded and Liam C. Martin was a great choice.
Beaujolois Elenora Catherine, the only daughter of the second earl of Charleville (1801–51) and his wife Harriet Charlotte Beaujolois Bury née Campbell (1803–48) was born on 4 December 1824 and survived almost as long in years as her later cousin, Col. Howard Bury. In case anyone would think that the name Beaujolois is in recollection of some Bacchanalian festive evening we should know that the unusual name was (as De Beer writes) due to her having as her godfather, Louis Charles d’Orleans, Comte de Beaujolais, brother of Louis Phillipe.[1] There is much about this connection in the Charleville Papers in Nottingham University. Beaujolois married Captain Hastings Dent in 1853 and died in 1903. Dent died in 1864. Lady Beaujolais had been married for only eleven years and was a widow for almost forty.
Fergal MacCabe is an architect, town planner and a topographical artist. He has managed to combine all three disciplines in his career. His fondness in recent years for the capriccio style of painting in many ways pulls together all his skills in how he views buildings and sees them in context. In his capriccio style Fergal MacCabe draws on real architectural elements and it is their juxtaposition that is whimsical. Yet he has regard to his own aesthetics, architectural and town planning skills in the buildings he selects and how he brings these buildings together.
For his jovial attitude to life we can probably thank his mother Winifred, who was by all accounts a character up to early passing in 1960.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism with his brother Charles, was the first person to record seeing the Van Nost memorial to the lately deceased earl of Charleville, the owner of Tullamore town and ‘the manor of Tullamore and Croghan’ – about 20,000 acres. Wesley recorded in his Journal:
Thursday 25 June 1767
I was desired to look at the monument lately erected for the Earl of Charleville. It observes ‘That he was the last of his family, the Great Moores of Croghan [sic].’ But how little did riches profit either him, who died in the strength of his years, or his heir, who was literally overwhelmed by them: being so full of care, that sleep departed from him, and he was restless day and night; till after a few months, life itself was a burden, and an untimely death closed the scene.
An article in the current edition of the Irish Georgian Society journal sheds more light on the Shinrone-born portrait painter Charles Jervas.[1] He was born in 1675 (or perhaps 1670) near Shinrone, King’ County (now County Offaly) and about eight miles south of Birr (Parsonstown) and was the son of John and Elizabeth Jervas (sometimes Jarvis, Jervis, Gervase and Gervaise). His mother was a Baldwin of Corolanty, Shinrone who were Cromwellian grantees. The old castle there (there are still ruins of it) was replaced in 1672 (other say 1698) by a large house – modified again in the eighteenth century and still standing. Jervas’s father, a Cromwellian, soldier-settler is said to have emigrated to America in 1688 to avoid the troubles then brewing due to the accession of a Catholic monarch and the changing power structure in Ireland as a result. He is said to have returned to Shinrone in the late 1690s and died there soon after, possibly in 1709. Another source has it that he died in America, but this seems unlikely.[2]
Alongside John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry the name of George Petrie (1790–1866) will forever be remembered as one of Ireland’s greatest scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a time when tremendous work was done for Irish archaeology and history. Petrie was a major figure in the historical research section of the Ordnance Survey. Jeanne Sheehy in her The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past 1830–1930 states that he was the founder of systematic and scientific archaeology in Ireland.
Petrie was involved in the work of the Ordnance Survey from 1833 for ten years. He was very much a polymath and in his late years published a volume of Irish music arising from his efforts to collect and preserve old Irish music.
Thomas Lalor Cooke, the Birr solicitor and historian, would be the last to consider himself an artist, but when pressed he was generally a good deal less self-deprecating. He published his first history of Birr in 1826 without adding his name to the title, rather akin to the ‘silver fork’ novelists fashionable at that time. Yet, there can be few in Birr or among the learned who did not know that it was Attorney Cooke of Cumberland (now Emmet) Street who was the author. No doubt he also provided signed copies for friends. And in Cooke’s own copy of the Picture he has recorded that he had two tokens (p. 109) and at p. 210 referred to one of the coins as ‘now in the possession of Mr Cooke of Parsonstown’.
When I was eleven I spent a long Easter weekend in the County Hospital in Tullamore. I don’t know what was wrong with me but it can’t have been anything serious and I remember it as a most enjoyable and stimulating experience.
The nurses and the nuns were kind and caring, the ward was spacious and sunlit with a lovely view across O’Connor Park to the Slieve Blooms, while the food was a lot more varied than I was accustomed to at home. My friends and neighbours visited with gifts of Easter eggs and sweets. I particularly remember getting little furry yellow chicks in one egg and kept them as a souvenir for many years after.
I think that my stay in that icon of Irish Modernist architecture, must have instilled my future love of good buildings but it was the glimpses of the large colourful painting in the entrance hall that really stuck in my mind. In the years to come, when visiting my mother or sick friends, I always stopped for a while to look at it again.
Its installation in the entrance of the new County Hospital, which opened in 1942 and of which the town was so proud, was the inspiration of the architect Michael Scott.
The Scott building Midlands Regional Hospital, Tullamore, erected 1938-42(more…)
The Murals Bar Cultural life in 1950s Tullamore centred around ‘The Murals’ bar. This was where us local artists, actors, historians and writers drank, clutching our copies of ‘Ulysses’ in its concealing brown paper cover while engaging in fevered and sparkling debates on cubism, existentialism, atonality and Marxism.
I may be exaggerating somewhat, but ‘The Murals’ really was our Deux Magots, our Cafe de Flore. The bar was the meeting place of what passed for an intelligentsia in Tullamore at a time, which, though it is now regarded as restrictive and obscurantist, I remember as stimulating and progressive. Maybe I was lucky.
The attraction of ‘The Murals’ was its design which was quite unlike any of the more traditional pubs of the town which were usually small, dark and poky. With its high ceiling, stripped down design, timber veneering, bright red stools, it was cool and elegant and above all- modern.
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