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But if you'd fill your glorious part,
And glance upon your work with pride,
An image true or Meagher impart,
Oh, place a shamrock o'er his heart –
For it he lived, for it he died.
Thomas Meagher, Irish nationalist, born on August 3, 1823; from Thomas Francis Meagher by James J Bourke

When the Bishop Projectus brought some relicks of that most glorious Martyr Stephen to Tibilis, a great multitude came together and went out to meet him at the shrine. There, a blind woman asked to be led to the Bishop, who was bearing the hallowed relicks. On these she laid the flowers which she was carrying, took them up again, touched her eyes with them, and forthwith received her sight. Whereupon she went forward rejoicing, at the head of the amazed procession, choosing her own path, and needing no more that any should lead her. I remember also the relicks of this same Martyr which hath been placed in the town of Synica, hard by this city of Hippo. Lucillus, Bishop of that place, was carrying them, with a multitude going before and following after ; when, all of the sudden, by bearing this hallowed burden, he was healed of a fistula, from which he even then was suffering, and which was being treated by a physician, an intimate friend of his, who was about to use the surgeon's knife upon him. Brethren, let us so desire to obtain temporal blessings by the intercession of the Protomartyr that we may by imitating him deserve those which are eternal.
From the Anglican Breviary 

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On which day of the week were you born? Find out here

1509 Etienne Dolet, scholar and printer (d. August 3, 1546)

1692 John Henley, clergyman (d. 1759)

1753 Charles Stanhope, inventor of the calculator

1770 King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia (d. 1840)

1803 Joseph Paxton, landscape gardener (d. 1865)

1808 Hamilton Fish, American  politician (d. 1893)

Thomas Francis Meagher

Irish rebel, Australian convict, US general

1823 It has well been said that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. This is the story of an Irishman, Thomas Meagher, who was almost hanged and his body chopped into four pieces by the British government, for his terrorist leanings, and who went on to become Governor of Montana, USA. His fellow terrorists also had remarkable careers – but more of them in just a minute.

This day saw the birth of Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish nationalist, and later transported convict, escapee, American Civil War general, and Governor of Montana.

In the 1840s, at the time of the great Irish famine, a party of radical Irish nationalists called the ‘Young Irelanders’ wrote articles in The Nation and The United Irishman newspapers arguing that the Irish people, if they had an Irish Parliament, could better deal with An Gorta Mor (‘the great hunger’), than could British parliamentarians sitting in London so removed from the Irish peasants dying by the hundreds of thousands.

One of the Young Irelanders who came to prominence, at a young age, was Thomas Meagher. Educated in Jesuit colleges, allowing him to receive a better education than most Catholics at the time, Meagher left college in 1843 with a reputation as a great patriot and orator. He took his fervour and oratorical ability to the Loyal National Repeal Association, the nationalist party of ‘the Great Liberator’, the elderly Daniel O’Connell. However, Meagher was of an impetuous nature and O’Connell’s devotion to non-violence could not keep Meagher in O’Connell’s ranks. The Young Irelanders had no such reservations about the use of force, and in 1848 Meagher, aged only 23, gave a firebrand speech that earned him the nickname ‘Meagher of the Sword’. 

Abhor the sword – stigmatize the sword? No, my lord, for at its blow, a giant nation was started across the waters of the Atlantic, … the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic – prosperous, limitless, and invincible!

It must have taken tremendous political, and physical courage for a youth to stand before hundreds of O’Connell’s supporters and so defy the great man. Young Meagher’s eloquence drew great attention to his cause, and many Irish were stirred by his words.

On April 15, 1848, Meagher presented the tricolor national flag of Ireland to the public for the first time at a meeting of the Young Irelander Party. Earlier that year – the year of revolutions in Europe, he had travelled to Paris with a YI delegation. Inspired by the tricolor French flag, he came up with similar design for the Irish flag, with orange, white and green stripes. The colours symbolized the uniting of the two traditions, Protestant orange, and Catholic green, in one new nation. In 1916, Meagher’s flag was revived by the Irish Volunteers, who were Irish soldiers in the American Civil War, and later adopted by Sinn Fein. Today, it is the flag of the Republic of Ireland, though Meagher’s version had the orange stripe closest to the staff, while the modern version has the green stripe in that position. 

 
The Young Irelanders in battle, Ireland

A fearsome sentence

In May, 1849, he was tried for “exciting the people to rise in rebellion”, but the trial was aborted. In July, the Young Irelanders attempted a rising among a people then suffering through some of the worst ravages of An Gorta Mor, which the British called the Potato Famine. The rising had no real prospects of success, and was soon crushed. Meagher was among those arrested, tried for high treason, and sentenced on October 23 to be hanged, drawn, and quartered – the British punishment for high treason:

That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members [genitals] shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the Queen’s pleasure.

Before passing sentence the Judge asked if there were any words that anyone wished to say. Meagher, speaking on behalf of his comrades, and knowing what torments probably awaited him, showed his characteristic amazing fortitude and spirit once again:

My Lord, this is our first offence but not our last. If you will be easy with us this once, we promise, on our word as gentlemen, to try better next time – sure we won’t be fools, and get caught.

Following passionate support from all round the globe, Queen Victoria commuted the barbaric sentence but another was passed: penal servitude for life in the cruellest prison of the British Empire. On July 29, 1849, with O’Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus, he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, as the brutal ‘worst offenders’ penal colony was known before it became Tasmania, now the southernmost state of Australia. Though few men or women ever found a way out, Meagher escaped from Van Diemen’s Land three years later and headed for New York, where Irish expatriates gave him a warm welcome.

Meagher and the US Civil War

There he became a popular speaker, and studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1855, and he started a paper called the Irish News on April 12, 1856. In 1858 he became an explorer, leading an expedition in Central America, and his tales from that place were published in Harper’s Magazine. When the Civil War began Meagher’s sympathies were with the South. However, when Fort Sumter was attacked, he quickly made the decision to support the cause of the Union, saying,

It is not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland. We could not hope to succeed in our effort to make Ireland a Republic without the moral and material support of the liberty-loving citizens of these United States.

Read on at the Meagher & Young Irelanders page in the Scriptorium

More on An Gorta Mor (An Gorta Mór) in the Book of Days

An Gorta Mor    Irish History: The ‘Famine’ and Emigration

An Gorta Mor    An Gorta Mor, the "famine"

An Gorta Mor in Book of Days    An tInneal Mallachtaí (Irish curse engine)

1833 Auguste Schmidt, feminist and teacher (d. 1902)

1856 Alfred Deakin (d. October 7, 1919), Australian lawyer, journalist and politician, a leader of the movement for Australian federation and later second Prime Minister of Australia; he held that post three times between 1903 and 1910. He was active in the Australian Natives Association and was also a lifelong spiritualist, with associations with the Theosophical Society. In 1900 Deakin travelled to London to oversee the passage of the federation bill through the Imperial Parliament, and took part in the negotiations with Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, which nearly derailed the whole process. In 1901 he was elected to the first federal Parliament as MP for Ballarat, and became Attorney-General in the ministry headed by Edmund Barton. Nicknamed 'Affable Alfred' by those of his contemporaries who liked him, he is regarded as a founding father by the modern Liberal Party.

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1867 Stanley Baldwin (d. 1947), three times British Conservative prime minister between 1923 and 1937

1872 King Haakon VII of Norway (d. 1957)

1887 Rupert Brooke (d. 1915), British war poet (1914 and Other Poems)

1900 Ernie Pyle, war correspondent (d. 1945)

1900 John T Scopes, defendant in the Monkey Trial (d. 1970)

1901 Stefan Wyszynski, primate of Poland (d. 1981)

1904 Clifford D. Simak, science fiction author, (d. 1988)

1918 Les Elgart, musician, bandleader

1920 PD James, British crime writer (A Taste of Death; Innocent Blood)

1923 Shenouda III of Alexandria, Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church

1924 Leon Uris (d. 2003), American author (Exodus; Topaz)

1926 Tony Bennett, American crooner (I Left My Heart in San Francisco)

1927 Gordon Scott, one of the many actors who have played Tarzan on the big screen

1935 Georgi Shonin, cosmonaut (d. 1997)

1936 Edward Petherbridge, actor

1937 Diane Wakoski, poet

1937 Steven Berkoff, actor

1938 Terry Wogan, Irish radio and television broadcaster on the BBC

1940 Martin Sheen, American actor (Catch-22; Apocalypse Now).

Sheen purposely flunked his college entrance exam to the University of Dayton so that he could pursue an acting career instead. His father wholeheartedly disapproved until he had gained popular success, not even seeing Martin act until he saw his son on the silver screen at a drive-in in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio.   Source

1941 Martha Stewart, American home economist

1946 Jack Straw, British politician

1947 Trevor White, singer who played the title role in the 1972 Sydney production of Jesus Christ Superstar

1948 Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Prime Minister of France

1950 John Landis, film director

1951 Jay North, American actor who played the title role in 1950s TV series Dennis the Menace. North also provided the voice for Bam Bam in the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon series, The Pebbles & Bam Bam Show.

“Jay left Hollywood in 1977 to do a tour of duty in the United States Navy.  He was honorably discharged and returned to Hollywood where he tried to reenter the acting profession. He found a couple of jobs, but he knew it was not going to be steady employment, so he retired from the entertainment business and went to work in the Health Food Industry. Jay has appeared on many T.V. talk shows, such as Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo, Phil Donahue, and others to discuss the difficulty most child stars face growing up in the spotlight.”   Source

1959 Martin Atkins, drummer

1963 James Hetfield, rock and roll musician, member of Metallica

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216 CE Hannibal defeated the Roman army at Cannae, with 50,000 Roman soldiers killed.

More 

Polybius: The Character of Hannibal

1181 Death of Pope Alexander III.

1460 The English killed the Scottish king James II during the siege of Roxburgh Castle.

1492 Christopher Columbus’s flotilla comprised of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, set sail westwards from the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera in search of India.

1492 The Jews were expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs.

1546 Etienne Dolet (Stephen Dolet ; b. 1509), scholar and pioneer in the arts of printing and typography, was executed for heresy, and because the church feared the power of the press to spread knowledge.

1645 The Second Battle of Nördlingen, fought between the forces of France and the Holy Roman Empire.

1667 Death of Francesco Borromini (b. 1599), italian Baroque architect.

1678 Robert LaSalle built the Griffon, the first known ship built in America.

1721 Death of Grinling Gibbons, master wood-worker (b. 1648)

1761 Death of Johann Matthias Gesner (b. 1691), scholar.

1778 The Scala opera house opened in Milan.

1780 Death of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (b. 1715), philosopher.

1792 Death of Richard Arkwright (b. 1732), industrialist, and inventor of the Water Frame.

1846 ‘Hutchins’, Australia’s oldest extant boys’ school, opened in Hobart, Tasmania.

1858 English explorer John Speke (May 4, 1827 - September 15, 1864) became the first white man to reach Lake Victoria (which he named), source of the Nile River.

1860 The Second Maori War began in New Zealand.

1900 The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company was founded.

1914 First World War: Germany declared war against France.

1916 Sir Roger Casement was hanged for his part in the Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland.

1916 First World War: The Battle of Romani was fought between forces of the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

1923 Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated as the 30th President of the United States.

1926 England’s first traffic lights were set up at Piccadilly Circus, London.

1929 Jiddu Krishnamurti dissolved the Order of the Star in front of a huge audience in Holland, in full view of the leaders of the Theosophical Society, effectively renouncing his claim to be the World Teacher and the new Messiah, a role bestowed (foisted?) upon him by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater in his childhood.

More    More    More    More    More    And more

1940 Second World War: Italy invaded British Somaliland.  

1942

“On the third of August, 1942, H.M.S. Jubilee was on the way to the Royal Navy base at Simonstown, near Cape Town. At 9 p.m., a phantom sailing ship was seen. The second officer, Davies, was in charge of the watch. Sharing this duty was the third officer, Nicholas Monsarrat, author of The Cruel Sea. Monsarrat signalled to the strange ship, but there was no response. Davies recorded in the log that a schooner, of a class that he did not recognise, was moving under full sail, even though there was no wind. The Jubilee had to change course, to avoid a collision. During the war, Davies’ superiors would have been in no mood for nonsense, and he must have had to weigh that against the dangers, especially in wartime, of not recording the strange things that he saw. In an interview, Monsarrat admitted that the sighting inspired him to write his novel The Master Mariner.

“According to Admiral Karl Doenitz, U Boat crews logged sightings of the Flying Dutchman, off the Cape Peninsula. For most or all of these crews, it proved to be a terrible omen. The ghostly East Indiaman was also seen at Muizenberg, in 1939. On a calm day in 1941, a crowd at Glencairn beach saw a ship with wind-filled sails, but it vanished just as it was about to crash onto the rocks. During the war years, there was plenty of room for bad omens.”   Source

More on the Flying Dutchman in the Book of Days

1947 A ceasefire came into effect between The Netherlands and Indonesian republicans in the struggle for power in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

1948 Whittaker Chambers (1901 - 1961) accused Alger Hiss (1904 - 1996), of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. Hiss almost certainly was.

1958 Nuclear submarine USS Nautilus travelled beneath the Arctic ice cap.

1960 Niger gained independence from France.

1961 In Canberra, Viscount de Lisle was sworn in as Australia’s Governor-General.

1966 American caustic comic and author (How to Talk Dirty and Influence People) Lenny Bruce (b. 1925) was found dead of a morphine overdose.

Lenny Bruce and addiction

'Lenny Bruce'

By Bob Dylan

Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on
Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon.
He was an outlaw, that’s for sure,
More of an outlaw than you ever were.
Lenny Bruce is gone but his spirit’s livin’ on and on ...

Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn’t commit any crime
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time.
I rode with him in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half,
Seemed like it took a couple of months.
Lenny Bruce moved on and like the ones that killed him, gone ...

Listen

 

1971 The Oz magazine obscenity trial ended with the jailing of Richard Neville and his co-defendants.

1972 The US Senate ratified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

1981 In the United States, Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization members walked off the job. All 13,000 members were eventually fired by President Ronald Reagan.

1973 A blaze at the Summerland amusement park on the Isle of Man killed 46 people.

1974 President Richard Nixon’s aides John Dean and John Ehrlichman were given prison sentences for their part in the Watergate conspiracy. Co-conspirator Bob Haldeman’s sentence was handed down in 1975.

1977 The first Federal law was enacted to regulate strip mining of coal in all states of the USA.

1988 The Iran-Contra hearings ended.

1990 UK temperatures reached a record high
A weather station in Leicestershire recorded the highest temperature ever known in Britain. The figure of 37C, or 99F, recorded at a weather station in Nailstone, Leicestershire, was 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the previous record set in 1911.

2000 George W Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Philadelphia.

 

 

Tomorrow: When will King Sebastian return?

 

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ABC Sydney Radio held a competition to finish the sentence, "It's so dry in Sydney that ..."

1. HIH insurance has come out of liquidation
2. If the England cricket team wasn't touring we'd never see ducks.
3. The Red Cross has launched a wet blanket appeal.
4. We're actually drinking the new vanilla Coke.
5. You're only permitted to eat watermelon between 8.00 pm and 8.00am
6. The Government has introduced a water-pistol buy-back scheme.
7. Thieves are siphoning off radiators instead of petrol tanks.
8. I'm encouraging the kids to wee in the pool.
9. We have to hand feed the rocking horse.
10. All the bottom-of-the-harbour tax schemes are resurfacing.
11. I saw two trees fighting over a dog.
12. All the Baptists have become Anglicans.
13. When my daughter fainted, it took three buckets of sand to bring her round.
14. I've sent my indoor plants out on agistment.
15. All the dogs are marking their territory with chalk.
16. Some of the 4WDs in Double Bay have actually got dust on them.

 

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