It has been a signal service rendered by The Times to provide accounts of deceased Irish persons that aspire to more realism and more balance in their assessments while bringing out the exceptional achievements and positive qualities that make the deceased worthy of notice in a newspaper outside their own country. In the absence of a comprehensive dictionary of Irish biography they have sometimes been the best accounts of a person’s life, at least for a period, and, as such, a valuable reference for historians.
It has been helpful to this process that many of these obituaries are prepared in advance and so allow for checking facts and for reflection unaffected by the immediate surge of sympathy surrounding a death.
It is conducive to frankness that obituaries are published anonymously and that the identity of the authors will not be disclosed by the paper in their lifetime, so keeping faith with the nineteenth century description of The Times as ‘the most obstinately anonymous newspaper in the World’. It may add to the authority of a piece that it seems to represent the views of a great newspaper rather than an individual author. It probably puts some pressure on the individual authors to reflect a general view of a person rather than to indulge a personal experience or assessment.
Obituaries (especially major ones) may first be prepared when their subjects are relatively young and so need revision many times before publication. Apart from new facts, what is interesting about a person’s life can change quite rapidly. In the nature of things, the subject sometimes outlives the original author and what emerges on the final day is a composite work.
Historically, Irish obituaries in The Times reflected somewhat the troubled relationship that the paper had with Ireland from the days of Daniel O’Connell up to the creation of the independent Irish state. The difficulties in the relationship might even be traced back further to the incident when Irishman Barry O’Meara, who had been removed by the British Government from his role as physician to the captive Napoleon on St Helena, horse-whipped William Walter, mistaking him for his brother John who was one of the proprietors and the responsible editor of the paper. O’Meara had been affronted because The Times had dismissed as a lie a statement in his memoirs that he had been told by the deposed Emperor that The Times was in the pay of the exiled Bourbons. It ended up in court with O’Meara getting away with a fulsome apology.
The Times, under the editorship of Thomas Barnes (1817–41) supported O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation. But their relationship with O’Connell went sour not long after he entered parliament in 1830 when he accused the paper of misreporting him. As he espoused the repeal of the Union and brought the ‘Romish clergy’ into politics, they denounced him as an unredeemed and unredeemable scoundrel and declared ‘war to the political extinction of one of us.’ One of the first assignments of the celebrated Irish-born reporter William Howard Russell was to report on O’Connell’s monster meetings in 1843 and on his subsequent trial and conviction in Dublin – it took over 24 hours to get the news of the verdict to London.
After O’Connell’s conviction had been set aside on appeal by the House of Lords, The Times returned to the fray, setting up what they called a commission in the form of a journalist sent to report on O’Connell’s treatment of his own tenants in Kerry. They were found to be living in poverty without a pane of glass in any of their windows. Russell was sent to Ireland again and, despite being on friendly terms with O’Connell, confirmed that this was indeed the case. O’Connell, for his part, denounced The Times as ‘a vile journal’ which had falsely, foully and wickedly calumniated him every day and on every subject. Against this background it is not surprising that his obituary in 1847 is critical and reflects a hostile political viewpoint. But its recognition of the positive qualities of what it called an ‘extraordinary man’ shows admirable balance. It claimed to have shown a forebearance of which O’Connell himself was incapable and to have treated indulgently the memory of a man who in a long lifetime seldom spared a fallen adversary.
The confrontation between nationalist Ireland and The Times reached its apotheosis in the late 1880s when The Times published a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’ that were, in fact, largely written by a young Irish Catholic barrister and journalist, educated under Jowett at Balliol, called John Woulfe Flanagan – although anonymously as was still customary for all articles. Parnell was accused of having been complicit with terrorism and the organized intimidation of the Land War. The allegations were subsequently supported by letters said to have been written by Parnell that were proved before a judicial commission to have been forged by one Richard Pigott. The unmasking of Pigott before the commission by Sir Charles Russell, a former Irish solicitor who was then the leader of the English Bar, was an historic set-piece much recalled in the annals of the law as well as politics. Less remembered is that the commission, on the strength of evidence given by the Fenian informer Henri Le Caron, upheld the substance of most of the charges made in the articles. The events cast a long shadow, well beyond the obituary published on Parnell’s death written by The Times’ leader writer E. D. J. Wilson where this was pointed out. An account of the episode in a volume of the History of The Times covering the years 1884 to 1912, published in 1947, led to corrigenda in an appendix in the next volume credited to Parnell’s surviving colleague and biographer Captain Henry Harrison MC. Attention was drawn to the role of Captain William O’Shea, the first husband of Mrs Parnell, as a witness before the commission and an admission made that the paper’s association with O’Shea proved by Captain Harrison ‘is not creditable’ and should not have been ignored in the History of The Times.
In his main address to the commission Sir Charles Russell had admitted the terrorism associated with the Land League but claimed that the root cause of it was English oppression and that the fomentor of discord between the two peoples through several generations had been The Times. Sir Henry James, who appeared for The Times, answered by citing a long list of critical occasions in Irish history when the paper had supported the Irish popular cause often at the risk of alienating dominant opinion in England. It had helped to secure Catholic emancipation; it had argued for the endowment of the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth and the disestablishment of the Irish Church; it had taken a leading part in the relief of distress during the Irish famine and advocated the extension of the Irish franchise; it had highlighted evictions and supported legislation giving greater protection to tenants.
Because of its opposition to nationalist aspirations The Times was berated in nationalist Ireland as the enemy of all things Irish. In fact, this was not so. The unionism of The Times was an inclusive unionism and did not spill over into a general antipathy to the Irish or even the Catholic Irish. Tom Moore, the poet, had been a regular and valued contributor. Edmund O’Donovan, the son of the great Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan and old Clongownian Frank Power were two Times journalists who perished with General Gordon reporting the Egyptian campaign of the 1880s.
In the obituaries columns, as elsewhere, the Irish of all backgrounds got a good show. Just occasionally there was some stereotyping, although it was not unfriendly. In 1891, remarking that in his qualities and talents as in his defects Sir John Pope Hennessy was a typical Irishman, his obituary depicted him as ‘quick of wit, ready in repartee, a fluent speaker, and an able debater but the enthusiasm and emotion which lent force and fire to his speeches led him into the adoption of extreme and impracticable views.’ A few years later the obituary of the colourful Irish judge Lord Morris of Spiddal contained the observation that ‘though an Irishman he was not given to verbosity.’ Of Michael Davitt, the Land Leaguer, it was remarked that ‘he was an Irishman of a somewhat unusual type dark and dour.’ A more extensive indulgence in stereotyping is to be found in the obituary of Charles Villiers