text:
1st November. At Nuremberg, Germany, the left-wing literature festival, and read from Rudi.
25th October. Was a guest speaker at a meeting of Sinn Féin election candidates and representatives at the Balmoral Hotel, Dunmurry, on the electoral strategy of the Republican Movement after the 1981 hunger strike and the building of a mass base.
23rd October. Was guest speaker at an internal Sinn Féin education meeting in Navan and was interviewed by Councillor Joe Reilly in front of a packed room and then did a Q & A.
22nd October. Interviewed by Mark Reynolds, GAA museum archivist who is writing a thesis on the GAA and the 1980/1981 hunger strikes.
20th October. Interviewed in Bombay Street by Meili Deschen from Swiss National Television for a documentary on walls and borders which will be broadcast to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty-five years ago.
18th October. Met up with Yann Demange at QFT at the showing of his film '71. Two years ago I gave Yann and his producer Angus Lamont a tour of West Belfast when they were researching. Also met Robin Gutch (producer of Hunger) whom I hadn't seen in six or seven years; and the screenplay writer Gregory Burke (who also wrote Black Watch).
15th October. Interviewed on the Nolan Show along with Ruth Dudley Edwards regarding a feature she wrote in the Belfast Telegraph, 'Time UK's enfant terrible and its leaders wised up', criticising "the ingratitude and the sense of entitlement" of the leaders of Sinn Fein and the DUP.
Finished the wonderful The Marquise of O- And Other Stories by Heinrich Von Kleist.
13th October. Interviewed by Aoife Hennigan who is writing her Leaving Cert essay on 'Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strike'.
At book launch in Crumlin Road Jail of William 'Plum' Smith's prison memoir, Inside Man.
8th October. Took part in debate in Trinity College Dublin: 'That This House Believes Political Violence Is Legitimate'. Narrowly lost.
3rd October. Did recorded interview for BBC's Sunday Sequence with host William Crawley and former UUP MP David Burnside about British Home Secretary Theresa May's proposals to ban 'extremists' accessing the web and being interviewed on television and comparisons between these proposals and the Broadcasting Ban on Sinn Féin introduced in 1988.
28th September. In Divis Street at site of republican election offices in 1964 to mark the anniversary of the Tricolour Riots and hear guest speaker Tom Hartley.
26th September. Interviewed on the Nolan Show about next Monday night's Peter Taylor's television documentary on the BBC: 'Who Won The War?'
The man present in Dublin and who later killed Casement – and 200 others during his despicable career – was John Ellis from Rochdale, Lancashire. I first came across his name when I was researching Reginald Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan, the two IRA men who assassinated Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson in London in 1922, and whom Ellis had also executed.
However, whilst Ellis, in a self-serving book which he dictated to a copytaker, 'Diary of a Hangman', writes about the civilians he hanged, he is careful not to make any mention about the political executions of Irish republicans, whether through fear of reprisal or because of the strictures of the Official Secrets Act.
Ellis's father was a barber, a trade which the son thoroughly disliked. Instead, he worked as a textile machinist and it was during a break in work that he and his mates were discussing an execution which had taken place the previous day.
Ellis, a man of slight physique, who was then 22-years-old, said, "That's the kind of job I'd like."
His mates all laughed at him. Ellis admitted that when younger he couldn't "kill a chicken, and once when I tried to drown a kitten I was so upset for the rest of the day that my mother said I was never to be given a similar job again."
Five years later, after a factory accident which left him physically weak, he opened his own barber's shop. He was now married but didn't tell his wife or parents that he had applied for the job as a hangman until he received a letter from the Home Office inviting him to London to take lessons in hanging.
His wife was stunned and asked, "Why on earth do you want to be an executioner?"
"I don't know," he replied. His mother was similarly outraged and totally opposed to the idea.
His training consisted of learning all the intricacies of calculating drops, measuring them off, how to fix a noose and use pinioning (restraining) straps. After being trained he returned home but became despondent when months passed and he hadn't been sent for. Then, in December 1901, he received a letter stating that he was to act as assistant to a double execution of a man and his nephew convicted of killing an in-law.
He was assistant to the official hangman, James Billington, "a small fat man", with whom he travelled to Newcastle Prison. They went into a pub near the jail for some lunch but had to finish quickly when they realised that three women crying at a nearby table were relatives of the condemned men.
After five years as an assistant in the executions of 32 people, Ellis was finally given responsibility for pulling the lever himself, on a man condemned to death for killing his lover. He was paid £2. 2s., plus expenses, so clearly was not doing it for the money.
He prided himself on his efficiency. There were two cases throughout his career that troubled him: the hangings of Edith Thompson for being an alleged accomplice in the killing of her husband (the actual killer said she was innocent) and an eighteen-year-old whom he described as a mere boy (there was uncertainty about his intelligence). Nevertheless, Ellis's struggles with his conscience never lasted more than a few hours. He felt it was 'his duty' to 'help' these poor wretches through their ordeals "with all the swift humanity that my twenty years' experience as a public hangman had taught me to how to bestow."
Minutes before her death Edith Thompson was in a state of collapse and had lost all control of herself. She screamed and sobbed and when she fainted they strapped her up and carried her to the scaffold where Ellis placed a white cap over her head before pulling the lever.
Throughout his career this slight man would work the majority of his time in his barber shop. When the Home Office letter arrived, requiring his service, once, twice or three times a year, off he would go like a small businessman with his suitcase, travelling anonymously by bus and train to the particular jail where he spent the night before the execution.
When he retired in 1924 his shop became a bit of a tourist attraction with people standing outside for hours just to catch a glimpse of him. He had eschewed all requests for newspaper interviews and refused to discuss his work. However, he couldn't settle, had received no pension from the Home Office, and began drinking heavily. In August 1924 he tried to kill himself but the bullet went through only his jaw. He was arrested and charged with the then criminal offence of attempting to commit suicide. The judge asked for and received an undertaking that he would not attempt suicide again.
"If your aim had been as straight as the 'drops' you have given it would have been a bad job for you. Your life has been lengthened and I hope you will make the best use of it – the spare life which has been granted to you."
Ellis returned to his hairdressers'. He received numerous offers to give lectures but eventually decided to go on stage and act in a play based on the true story of the infamous nineteenth-century cat-burglar and murderer, Charlie Peace. In the final scene, Ellis came on stage dressed in black and hanged him – or at least, the actor, playing him. The play caused uproar in the press for its sheer bad taste and was withdrawn at the end of its first week.
Ellis then put on a road show, touring seaside towns and fairs giving demonstrations on the British method of execution, using a working model. The crowds paid sixpence a time to witness mock hangings.
In 1932 Ellis, who was still drinking heavily, threatened his wife and daughter with a cut-throat razor and screamed, "I'll cut your heads off!" With 203 executions under his belt they wisely fled the house.
Ellis ran to the front door and drew the razor across his throat making a five-inch gash. He collapsed and died in a pool of blood on the street.
Neither the Home Office nor the Prison Commissioners were represented at his funeral.]]>
Each year it blooms in our back garden. The story below is from my book All The Dead Voices.
Billy McCulloch comes to our house for his Sunday dinner and some nights he and I sit in his living room and drink and talk about poetry, which he loves, or he'll recall certain historical events which impressed him, such as the race for the South Pole, of life in Belfast during the blitz, or about all the people he knew in his life. Splashed on his table before him are poetry books that he is reading and letters he is writing and we have to make room for the glasses and the gin. Often he mentions an old friend, Gibbie, about whom I have heard so much that I feel we are acquainted. Billy is eighty nine but had to give up driving some years ago. He lost his balance and became shaky on his legs, had to use first a stick and now this past year a frame.
I don't own a car but my son, Kevin, who was holidaying in Mexico for a fortnight had left me his. Then, over a few gins late one night we planned that in Kevin's car to Gibbie's, to Cumbria, England, we would go! On a sunny May morning Billy and I packed our cases like excited kids and drove on to the Stranraer ferry.
Billy was born a Protestant in East Belfast in the year that the 'Titanic' was launched, 1911. He describes his nationality as left-wing or sans frontier. His father, John William, came to Belfast from Birkenhead as an iron moulder during the engineering boom in the 1880s, bringing with him his new wife, Mary Francis (whom he addressed as 'Polly') from Conah's Quay, Wales. She had worked as a domestic servant. At first they lived in a single room but later managed to move into a new house on working-class Rosebery Road, most of whose menfolk worked in the nearby shipyard.
Rosebery Road, built in the 1890s, was named after Archibald Philip Primrose (who became the 5th Earl of Rosebery after the death of his grandfather in 1868) and became British prime minister when Gladstone resigned in 1894. He caused mayhem when he made his first speech as premier and said that Home Rule for Ireland could only come about when England, 'the predominant member of the three Kingdoms' agreed to it. Primrose had left Oxford after he came into conflict with the university authorities over his ownership of a racehorse. Despite not having a degree, he was considered to be a distinguished, young intellectual. He declared that he had only three ambitions: to marry an heiress, to win the Derby and to become Prime Minister. He achieved all three. When he resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, Gladstone made an assessment of Rosebery's character: 'I can say three things of him: One, he is one of the very ablest men I have ever known; two, he is of the highest honour and probity; and, three, I do not know whether he really has common sense.'
Half way up the Lough I looked back at Belfast and imagined how the formidable shipyards, linen mills and rope works must have looked from the boat through the eyes of Billy's young parents, about to put down their roots in this part of the world.
Our sailing took just over three hours and the weather and conditions were perfect. We disembarked just after lunchtime and began the long drive to Cockermouth in Cumbria, across the border. The road had been improved since I remembered being on it last in my teens, almost thirty years ago, furiously driving late through the night, my girlfriend beside me, as Stevie Wonder's song 'Superwoman' kept fading in and out on Radio Luxembourg. Billy is naturally garrulous and kept me occupied but in between the silences memories came to me, about old friends, what had happened to them in the Troubles, who had and had not survived, and the journeys we have all gone through.
We were short on petrol but there were no petrol stations (bar two family ones that looked permanently closed) on the seventy-mile stretch between Stranraer and Dumfries. And, when we did stop to refuel, across the English border, the garage accepted our Northern Irish sterling notes, though I had expected objections. At that garage and, later, when we were to ask for directions or order coffee and sandwiches in a cafe or dinner, we found the English to be gentle, kind, warm, and helpful, without being ingratiating, in sharp contrast to my experience in Ireland of their uniformed sons, and, I believe, to the experience of other subject peoples around the world, who found them repressive, pompous and self-righteous. I wondered, how could such a cultured and law-abiding people dramatically change personae when they stepped onto someone else's shore?
Throughout our journey there were to be many literary reminders. We passed through Dumfries, where Robbie Burns spent his last days, drove past Eccelfechan, birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, the historian and essayist. It was Carlyle who introduced to the English language that brilliant German word schadenfreude, to express the perverse pleasure we experience from someone's misfortunes. He used it to describe the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli's delight in mischief when proposing the Second Reform Bill in 1867 which extended the franchise to many city workers and small farmers. (In his younger days Disraeli wrote trashy love novels which received terrible reviews. It was he who also said: 'There are three kind of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.')
We arrived at Cockermouth around five o'clock, stopping off at a shop so that Billy could buy some flowers. Gibbie's and Billy's eyes lit up when they saw each other. Gibbie is very nimble for eighty-six, and helped Billy with his things. Gibbie, a Scotsman, was born in Coatbridge in 1915. He says that although his town's population was divided fifty/fifty between Protestants and Catholics he never met a Catholic until he went to university. Billy had married Maureen, a Catholic from Ballymacarret, East Belfast. Maureen's mother was a convert from the Protestant faith, and had come from Farnham Street on the Lower Ormeau Road, an area which during recent decades has experienced a complete demographic shift and is now wholly nationalist. It is one of those areas which the Orange Order demands a 'traditional' right to march through several times each year.
Billy worked as a weaver in linen factories in Belfast but devoted all his holiday time to hostelling. One day, sixty-five years ago on a July day, in the Scottish village of Balloch, at the bottom of Loch Lomond, he stopped to look in a shop window. Another young man came up and looked into the window, then said to Billy, 'Where are you going?' Billy replied, 'I haven't decided, but I'll go wherever you're going.'
So they hostelled together, were sometimes mistaken for brothers, and forged a lifelong friendship, writing to each other when Gibbie was in the British Army during WWII, and visiting each other, even after they were both married. They met their wives, Maureen and Sadie, whilst hostelling, Billy in Slievenamon in the Mourne Mountains and Gibbie in the Cairngorms. Both Maureen and Sadie died three years ago, and Billy and Gibbie hadn't seen each other in twelve years.
It was a glorious evening so we sat on a bench in Gibbie's back garden and I listened with fascination as they reminisced about their hostel days, trekking mountains and bogs, about all the characters they went about with, about the 'code', quite chivalrous, that operated in the Youth Hostel Movement in the 1930s, and the respect that young men had for women. Every person lives through a rich history and every story is different, is told from a different, if even marginally different, angle.
Billy is self-taught and has an amazing grasp of poetry and an impressive repertoire. Although his father read a lot, Billy attributes his interest in books to several influences: his neighbours, the Boyces from Rosebery Road, whose house came down in books and whose sons were among the working-class few who went on to university (Billy remembers John Hewitt being a regular visitor to their house); and Joe Walker, 'an ingrained socialist' from Newtownards, a moulder in Harlands, just like Billy's father. Walker bought a book every Saturday and the books crept up the walls of his sitting room like ivy, as he had no shelves.
Gibbie has a degree in English from Glasgow University and worked as a teacher before retiring. He never expected to end his days in Cockermouth. When the Second World War broke out a friend of his from Coatbridge, a law clerk who was working his way up to be a solicitor, refused to serve and declared himself a conscientious objector. He was sent to Barlinnie Prison in Scotland where harsh treatment eventually broke him. He then agreed to join the Army but when he went for his medical he was turned down – due to a mastoid infection in his ear from childhood.
Instead of going to war he relieved an employee from a legal practice in Aberdeen who went off to fight. On one occasion the clerk was sent to investigate a claim in the Lake District and whilst there he met a nurse from South Wales, fell in love and eventually married. He always spoke to Gibbie about the beauty of the Lake District but Gibbie was too proud or too Scottish, he says, to take it in. Then, when Gibbie's daughter Margaret got married and moved to Cockermouth, he and Sadie to be near her, ironically, came to live here, the place about which he was once dismissive. Although millions have experienced displacement due to war and conflict, or have had to emigrate from their native country, I suppose that the majority of people in this world live and die close to the land or village or street where they were born.
On Wednesday the three of us went for a drive through part of the Lake District, lakes whose names I, as a kid, had to learn in Geography Class, along with details of the British coal and steel industries. The scenery was breathtaking but the countryside was fairly deserted of livestock and visitors due to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, which had hit Cumbria quite hard. We drove past many roadside inns and hotels and I often wondered if this or that one was where Roy and Vera had stayed, thirty years before.
Whether it was a reference to nature or the elements, love or life, Billy or Gibbie would recite part of a verse from Wordsworth, who was born in Cockermouth, or Burns or the Bible, and the other would finish it. I couldn't keep up with them and I wished I had had a tape-recorder.
Early sun on Beaulieu water
Lights the undersides of oaks,
Clumps of leaves it floods and blanches,
All transparent glow the branches
Which the double sunlight soaks
I asked Billy where he got that from and he replied, 'Betjeman, "Youth and Age on Beulieu River, Hants".' Later, I looked up the poem and learnt that it was about mortality and the envy of an old woman for a young girl. Over the past year Billy has been increasingly talking about death. He becomes emotional when talking about his son Bill, a talented craftsman, who died suddenly of a heart attack three years ago. He says how much he misses Maureen who died from cancer, about her deep Catholic faith and belief in the afterlife, which he could never share. He talks about his youth, about Rosebery Road to which I've offered to bring him, but which he does not want to see. And he wonders whether he'll make it to ninety.
Billy was the youngest of three sons and four daughters, all of whom are now dead (John, Alexander, Molly, Edith, Nellie and Mamie). He said to me once: 'All the sisters got married and left. It was a tremendous regret to see your family diminishing like that. Everything changes so horribly as you grow up. All of them are gone…I am the last of the Mohicans,' he joked.
He pointed to an old family picture on the wall, taken around 1919. 'There's my father sitting there and you can tell by his attitude that he was the disciplinarian of the family. My mother was a very, very soft person. I can never remember my mother chastising me in any way. I was a spoilt skitter! But I loved my oul mother and you can see by the photograph that I'm hanging on to her there.'
I had asked him some questions about his parents' courtship, the type of detail that a child often picks up from innuendo or light banter in the home, but he couldn't recall. 'I can't even ask my sisters, who are bound to know a hell of a lot more about my mother and father than I would… Damn it, it's bloody awful when they're all gone. They used to live over in different parts of East Belfast and you'd go over there and you'd say, I'll go and see Molly. Ach Christ, she's dead. Bloody awful,' he whispered through clenched teeth.
Driving around Derwent Water Billy and Gibbie had the cheek to sing and exchange hymns and I joked with them because they are both atheists. In St George's Church in High Street, Belfast, Billy's father had been an 'official', that is, he organised the collection at the Church of Ireland services, and through him Billy and his brother, John, became members of the choir. However, Billy claims that he himself was 'a crow', and bluffed his way for some time. Then, one day at school, an inspector came into his class and asked his teacher, Miss Freebourne, if she had any good singers. "I knew right away what she was going to say. She said, 'Willie. Could you sing something for the inspector.' Well, I fell from grace after that." Nevertheless, he dates his love of classical music from that time.
His brother John was known in the family as 'a joiner' – not by trade but because he would have joined anything. He was an engineer at the shipyard, joined the Merchant Navy, then joined the Orange Order on his return. Billy joked that he must have taken after him. The parents of Billy's companion Robert Boyce were members of the Plymouth Brethren and Billy used to go along to the meeting hall with them. He recalled one preacher, a bread server, who used to get up and do his stint, by beginning, "Dear Brethren and Cistern…" which had Robert and him wetting themselves.
Billy, as a young boy, also had the distinction of marching down the Lower Ormeau Road with the Orange Order. An Orangeman called Jimmy, who was dating Billy's sister Mimi, asked him would he like to carry a string of one of the banners on the Twelfth of July parade. 'Says I, "Do I get paid?" "Certainly, you get paid,"' he was assured. And he did.
Gibbie directed us to Pendle Hill and showed me the rock where George Fox, the founder of the Quaker Movement, had preached to thousands of people in the 1650s. 'When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered. As I went down, I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunk but little for several days before.'
Fox had been imprisoned eight times between 1649 and 1675. He met Cromwell in 1656 and advised him not to accept the Crown which was being offered to him and which he eventually refused. Fox argued against the formalism of the established Church and all social conventions: 'The Lord forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low… neither might I bow or scrape my leg to any one.'
Billy, Gibbie and I had our last supper together on Wednesday night, I cooking, as they again sat outside in the warm evening, close together, retelling events from forty and fifty years ago, cracking open small epiphanies to reveal what one or other had perhaps forgotten, and I heard the occasional laugh and confirmation.
On Thursday morning, Gibbie and Billy came out to the car and I asked them to stand for a photograph. Then they shook hands for a long time and said goodbye. As we turned the corner from Rose Lane, Billy said with finality and a passion, 'That's my old friend Gibbie, who I met in 1936.'
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much
Unvisited, endeavoured to retrace
The simple ways in which my childhood walked;
Those chiefly that first led me to the love
Of rivers, woods, and fields…
O Friend! O Poet! brother of my soul,
Think not that I could pass along untouched
By these remembrances.
- William Wordsworth]]>
Then, last week, I discovered that one of my readings in Berlin was going to be at the Heinrich von Kleist Library in a district of the former East Berlin – and what an occasion it turned out to be! The library was full, Marina Georgi and her staff laid on drinks and food and gave me presents of a pen, beers from the local micro-brewery, but most precious of all was a hardback copy of Knulp, published in 1925. Marina told me that earlier that day an old man called into the library. He couldn't come to the event but that he would like her to give me the book as a memento of my visit! What a gesture, what kindness. Thank you, whoever you are.
16th September. Was part of a panel discussion on tonight's BBC television's Spotlight chaired by Noel Thompson. Was on with Fionnuala O'Connor and Alex Kane to discuss the legacy of Ian Paisley who died last Friday. I said that I was wrong when I thought he would never do a deal with Sinn Féin but that I was glad he had, and had brought the DUP over the line. I also doubted whether he had done it for egotistical reasons and I didn't buy into the theory that he wanted 'peace-maker' rather than 'trouble-maker' on his headstone because he must have known that he could not so easily erase all that came before. Simplistically – although the cause of the conflict is much more complex – if the cause of our recent Troubles could be laid at the door of one man, it would be Ian Paisley. After we left the studio Fionnuala and I were criticised on air by Gregory Campbell for our 'disgraceful' remarks!
12th September. Went to Dorotheenstadt Cemetery and visited the graves of Heinrich Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Christa Wolf, and Hegel, and was standing at the grave of Bertolt Brecht when I received a text message from my brother Ciaran to tell me that Ian Paisley had died.
During one of my interviews I was asked about the provenance of the name Rudi which was thought not to be German. Then, as I was walking around Dorotheenstadt didn't I come across this grave!
11th September. Visited the House of the Wannsee Conference. Here on 20th January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting lasting just a few hours. Attended by fifteen high-ranking SS officers and representative of Germany's public administration the plan was drawn up to murder all European Jews. The house itself is eerie for having been filled with evil but now it is the location for a permanent exhibit and an education department which offers youth groups and school children talks on the holocaust and the history of National Socialism and its consequences. There were about thirty young people there at two separate seminars. The historian Joseph Wulf had between 1965 and 1972 attempted but failed to found a documentation centre in the villa. It was only in 1992, after German reunification, that the Memorial and Educational Site was established – on the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference.
At Heinrich von Kleist library tonight I read from Rudi and was interviewed by Milena Adam who also acted as translator.
10th September. Visited the Stasimuseum in the morning. This afternoon, in the Haus Der Berliner Festspiele was my first event – 'Approaches to Trust' – which was moderated by the well-known translator Bernhard Robben with an actor, Matthias Scherwenikas, reading from a political essay I wrote. Later, it was the same platform but in the Martin-Luther Kirche and the discussion and reading was about Rudi.
9th September. Interviewed by Berlin's Radio 1 about the situation in Ireland and my book Rudi.
Attended the official opening of the ilb.
8th September. With friends was given a personal tour of the Reichstag. Later, met the Irish Ambassador to Germany, Michael Collins. He introduced Jörg Rademacher who spoke about his exhibition on the life of Oscar Wilde which was on display and about his new translation of Dorian Gray for which I wrote the introduction.
7th September. Went to Jablonskistrasse, the setting of no 55, the apartment where the fictional Otto and Elise Hampel live in the Fallada novel Alone In Berlin.
6th September. In Berlin to attend the International Literature Festival (ilb).
1st September. Interviewed on Radio Foyle, then on the Nolan Show, re the 20th anniversary of the IRA ceasefire.
31st August. Went up to Long Kesh and looked out across the old car park towards where the visiting area and H-Blocks were, and reflected on the conflict on this the anniversary of the 1994 ceasefire.
30th August. Interviewed in RTE studio Dublin by Aine Lawlor for the Marian Finucane Show about the 20th anniversary of the IRA ceasefire and also about my writings.
27th August. Interviewed by Paul Clarke on UTV along with William 'Plum' Smith, former loyalist prisoner, about the 20th anniversary of the IRA ceasefire.
25th August. Did Skype interview with Leaving Certificate student Megan Conway on Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strike.
23rd August. At meeting in Ulster Hall addressed by George Galloway whom I later took to the Andersonstown (PD) Social Club, then to Kelly's Cellars.
18th August. Interviewed by Victoria McGroary who is at Brandeis University, USA, and who is working on her doctorate about the Troubles, in particular Sinn Féin and its transformation into the dominant nationalist party in the North.
9th August. At City Airport picked up Martin Sixsmith and his wife Mary. Later, did guest interview with Martin about his journalism but particularly about his book, Philomena.
8th August. Interviewed by Gerry Braiden for The Herald on the Scottish referendum on independence on 18th September. Chaired Féile event given by Sean Connolly on performance enhancement.
6th August. At City Airport picked up Marina Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian) who will be speaking at Scribes tomorrow along with Conal Creedon and Ronan Bennett.
5th August. Edited down a lengthy feature on Culture of Trust which will appear in Berliner Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau.
4th August. At Féile-organised discussion of 20th anniversary of IRA ceasefire. On the platform: Brian Rowan, Eamonn Mallie and Charlie Bird.
1st August. At the launch of white marble bust of Bobby Sands, sculpted by Paraic Casey from County Clare. At the event in the Felons Club both Paraic and Gerry Adams spoke.
31st July. Chaired launch of Tom Hartley's new book, Milltown Cemetery – Written In Stone. This is my introduction:
My name is Danny Morrison and I am proud to chair this opening event of Feile 2014, especially since it is on behalf of one of my oldest friends, Tom Hartley.
I actually knew Tom's brother Terry when both of us were waiters in the International Hotel back in 1968. I think it was in that hotel that the inaugural meeting of the Civil Rights Movement was held, and, of course, it was also from that hotel, where he worked, that in 1966 young Peter Ward went for a drink to the Malvern Arms and was shot dead on his way out.
Of course, none of us back then, fairly innocent, were to know of the darkness that lay ahead.
Tom and I became friends and comrades through our work in the Republican Press Centre where I was based as editor of Republican News and Tom was the manager.
He wrote a few pieces back then but was mostly in charge of putting pressure on people to pay their bills. In fact, he got a very angry reply back from a republican prisoner serving life in England who had received a letter from Tom saying that if he didn't pay his bill his subscription would be cut off.
Later, Tom became general secretary of Sinn Fein and was a good, healthy and progressive influence on the party, and, of course, he has also been Lord Mayor of Belfast. Tom was the first member of Sinn Fein to attend the First World War commemoration service at Islandbridge in Dublin in 1994.
This festival, Féile an Phobail, celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. Tom was involved from the outset but his initial contribution actually didn't involve cemeteries but taking a minibus of tourists around West Belfast and pointing out famous landmarks. He would stop in Harrogate Street and point out a certain house and explain that a famous Irishman had been born in it. It was missing a plaque but it was, of course, the house were one Tom Hartley had been born.
When he first began his walks of City Cemetery he gave myself and the poet Michael Longley a private, fascinating tour, and he certainly opened my eyes to the history of the unionist people as 'written in stone' and our complicated history. For example, one grave he brought us to was that of Robert Lynd.
Robert Lynd was born in North Belfast in 1879. His father, a Presbyterian minister and former Moderator, was an anti-Home Ruler. Robert, though, declared himself a socialist, became a fluent Irish speaker and later a republican, but was opposed to physical force, believing that violence would alienate the unionists, for whom he always maintained a great affection.
He worked in London as a journalist and while there got to know Michael Collins. He taught Roger Casement Irish and was one of the most active petitioners for Casement's reprieve in 1916, visiting him in Brixton Prison.
He was a member of Sinn Fein for a while and also wrote the introduction to James Connolly's book, Labour in Irish History.
He died in London in 1949 but was buried in the city cemetery. There were tributes from George Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey. The Union flag at Inst.
College, his old school, hung at half-mast. Present at his funeral here on the Falls Road, were Vice-Marshall Sir William Tyrrell; Sam Porter, then Lord Chief Justice; Lynd's nephew, Robert Lowry, a future Lord Chief Justice (who in 1978 would acquit Gerry Adams of an IRA membership charge); the artist William Conor; the former IRA Chief of Staff, Sean McBride, then Minister of External Affairs for the Dublin government; McBride's assistant, Conor Cruise O'Brien; and Senator Denis Ireland.
Tom was discovering for us an almost, almost lost past.
I now have the honour of introducing our main speaker, Philip Orr, who will officially launch Tom's companion volume to his book on City Cemetery. Philip is a former teacher, a consultant to various museums, a playwright and author of the best-selling book, The Road To the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story.
He is a good friend of Feile and has appeared on many Feile platforms before - performing along with Mike Gaston a selection of Robbie Burns poems and songs, discussing with Joe Austin the poppy and the lily and he will be speaking at the Falls Library next Wednesday on the subject of 'The Great War and Unionist Memory'.
26th July. Went to the Gate Theatre in Dublin to see The Price by Arthur Miller. Brilliant.
A friend from Colorado asked me was I ever in La Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Several times I was there and in 2003 wrote a feature about it which appeared in my book, Rebel Columns. It was titled 'And Outcasts Always Mourn'. Here it is:
Foremost, there are two types of tourists: those who go away to relax and luxuriate, usually in a balmy climate, and those who go away to learn and explore. However, no matter where I go, or what type of holiday I embark on, I get restless after three of four days and look forward to getting back to the blue skies above Black Mountain in 'equatorial' West Belfast.
We went to Gran Canaria for a week a few years ago – to Playa del Ingles, and our apartment was within petrol-bombing distance of the Kasbah, the playground for youngsters with boundless energy who danced and drank till dawn. We were in bed for 10 each night but thanks to these kids, not asleep until six each morning. It wasn't until we hired a car and took to the mountains, away from the madness of the resorts, that the holiday became tolerable.
Even so, getting home to beautiful Belfast was the best part.
So, I prefer short holidays to long ones, and pack in as much as possible.
Two weeks ago, my wife and I and her nephew Peter from Toronto (our French translator) went to Paris for three days and walked out a pair of shoes each. Did all the usual sights: Arc de Triomphe, Moulin Rouge, Le Sacre Coeur, the Seine cruise, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre (with the Mona Lisa looking browned off with all the attention). Viewed the city from the top of the Eiffel Tower, dined in Montmarte, and drank endless cups of strong coffee at sidewalk cafes. On occasions we split up and went our separate ways and thus I spent the last day all by myself, out at Le Père Lachaise, wandering through the city's largest cemetery.
I love cemeteries, not because I am morbid (though I am harmlessly melancholic), but because cemeteries speak for a people, its motley collection of individuals, from the lowliest to the highest, from the leaders to the followers, the politicians, the writers and musicians, the masses. They tell a people's history and though the briefest of details – name, date of birth and death, and sometimes an epigraph – are carved in and will fade over time from headstones, even these last words evoke a great narrative about a person's worth, their place on this earth, their legacy.
The cemetery opened in 1804 as a solution to the problem of overcrowding following the revolution of 1789. The first man to be buried here was an anonymous bell-ringer from the local police station, but several famous Parisians were re-interred in Pere-Lachaise, including Moliere, the French dramatist who wrote, "We die only once, and for such a long time." The cemetery became a much sought after resting place for the rich and famous – or the stranded, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Jim Morrison. Yeats died in Paris in 1939, on the same day as a Parisian refuse collector, and they were buried close together. There is a theory that the person who was re-interred in Drumcliff in Sligo never wrote a poem in his life but emptied plenty of bins.
Le Pere-Lachaise covers 100 acres and I walked most of it, beginning with the grave of Rossini. There, I thanked him with a few prayers and found myself irreverently humming the 'William Tell' overture, that is, the theme for 'The Lone Ranger' to which, as a child, with a yard brush called 'Silver' between my legs I use to "de-deeee-de-de-deeee-de-dee-dee-de-deee-dee…" through Andersonstown with the ever-faithful 'Tonto' (six-year-old Brendan Hunter) on his mop by my side.
(Only when I got home from Paris did I discover that the mausoleum was empty and that Rossini's body was moved to Florence in 1887 – but nobody has told the Paris Tourist Board, or else they are not letting on.)
Other composers buried in the grounds, and still here, I hope, include Bizet, Chopin, Dukas and Poulenc; singers Maria Callas and Edith Piaf, where fresh flowers had been laid; actors Simone Signoret, Yves Montand and Sarah Bernhardt; the dancer, Isadora Duncan; and writers from Balzac to Colette, to Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and the American Richard Wright, author of that brilliant novel, 'A Native Son'.
The cemetery has 97 divisions and is easily navigable because each section is signed and named. I am not sure what the convention is in other cities and towns throughout Ireland but here in West Belfast's vast City Cemetery and Milltown Cemetery there are no signs on the roads and lanes, making it possible to lose loved ones not just once, but again and again. Of course, great argument would erupt if our councillors were tasked to agree to name lanes after notables, given the large number of Orange leaders, empire builders, British soldiers and IRA members who populate both cemeteries.
Soft rain fell as I made my way through the cobble-stoned avenues of Le Pere Lachaise, drawing out that universal, almost sweet, earthy odour from the trees, bushes and clay, and the scent of our dead.
And then I came upon the Mur des Federes, and I stood and wondered about the dreams that died here in a nightmare.
In the Franco-German war of 1870 France was thrashed and Napoleon III was taken prisoner. But Paris fought on and declared a 'Government of National Defence'. It lay under siege for six months before surrendering. Meanwhile, a pro-monarchist Assembly in Versailles, outside the capital, with Adolphe Thiers as Chief Executive, accepted an armistice. Paris, which had a strong revolutionary and republican tradition, rose up against the capitulation of the government and formed the Commune (municipal council). The Commune put a moratorium on unpaid war-time rents and stopped pawnshops from selling goods, made all church property state property, postponed debt obligations, and abolished interest on the debts.
Thiers, watched by German forces, bombarded the city for six weeks, which was then slowly taken, barricade-by-barricade, street-by-street in bloody battles, in which at least 30,000 people lost their lives and over 17,000 more were either executed or transported to French penal settlements overseas.
The 'Communards' made their final stand in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. And here, at Mur des Federes, in the quiet eastern corner, is the wall against which their leaders, 147 of them, were executed and buried. Not far away is the grave of Thiers who died six years later.
And finally to the grave of that great genius Oscar Wilde – broken and murdered by the intolerance of society because he loved men. I am sure Wilde would enjoy the fact that the authorities no longer replace his penis, or rather that on his monument, which collectors would break off as mementoes. In his lane the trees were shedding their small, pale leaves, like a perpetual autumn. Three sides of his monument were imprinted with lipstick from the adoring, some voluptuous, kisses of many women.
And on the fourth were these lines from 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Looking at the wall, I thought to myself, where are and what ever happened to Joseph McNally, Joseph McKenna from 1C, Kevin Fusco and Jim Donnelly both from 2B, who were pupils at St Gabriel's School, Antrim Road, Belfast, in 1974?
The story begins last Friday afternoon in London when I went to an exhibition at the National Army Museum. Parked outside the museum is a large First World War cannon and a Humber Armoured Car, or 'Pig', which we used to mistakenly call a Saracen. The claustrophobic innards of this vehicle always smelt of gun oil, sour sweat and bad breath, sometimes of cordite, and always fear, usually one's own.
I went into the foyer and up to the desk. The receptionist said, "Can I help you, man?" Then, realising he was at work, said, "I mean, sir," and we both smiled. I was looking for the 'Painting The Troubles' exhibition, and he pointed to a ground-floor gallery, next to The Great Escape Café.
I had heard about the exhibition on Radio Ulster's Arts Extra. Other permanent exhibitions range from 'The Making of Britain 1066 – 1783' to 'Fighting for Peace 1946 – 2006', which I thought was an interesting euphemism for most of those brutal counter-insurgency operations Britain fought and lost before eventually relinquishing the majority of its colonial possessions.
From the beginning of the First World War Britain has had 'official war artists' to cover battles and army life during conflict. Paintings, which in the early days had to go through the censor, were for propaganda purposes as well as part of the official record. The Imperial War Museum in London has dispatched artists to every major conflict involving British soldiers (including the Falklands/Malvinas, today's Afghanistan and Iraq) but never to the North of Ireland because the British government refused to recognise it as a war.
This is the first time that the National Army Museum has displayed an exhibition relating exclusively to the conflict here, so this represents some progress.
Ralph Lillford, who now lives in Australia, did his national service from 1952 to 1954, before becoming a professional artist. His visits to the North between 1971 and 1976 when he had access to the British army make up the theme of his exhibition. Images of soldiers, and life through the eyes of soldiers, predominate. Life in the barracks is depicted as extremely tedious. In a church, which has been taken over as a billet, the walls are covered in pornographic pictures.
A painting titled, '68-76', of Belfast's Grand Central Hotel after the IRA blew it up in April 1974, is depicted by Death calling and carrying a photograph of Christ, which suggests, unfortunately, that Lillford didn't travel too far in his journey through the stereotypes. Another, 'Seamus Dealer', which is set in 1975, has this explanation: "To signify urban life at this time, the artist deliberately introduced incongruous imagery to strike a discordant note. He also placed the soldier midway between the Protestant house and the Roman Catholic-owned shop, so that he is caught in the middle literally as well as metaphorically."
The soldiers neither arrest nor shoot anyone. Only a car is searched, no homes.
On a large piece of clear Perspex, representing a gable wall, visitors are invited to write their names, or whatever. I wrote 'UP THE IRA' – in the interests of balance – before noticing the CCTV frowning at me.
I don't know enough about the art or philosophy of painting and what makes for greatness and can only articulate my own response. Lillford's paintings are interesting – and do capture something of the atmosphere of the period. I suppose the one I liked most was that of the Grand Central Hotel (containing a sample of the original loud wallpaper), after the deathly Roman Catholic IRA came to redecorate.
Near the end of the exhibits I was surprised when I came across a series of adolescent drawings. They were street scenes, mostly of riots in nationalist areas, including The Bone in Belfast, and were signed by the young people I mentioned at the outset.
According to Lillford he was in a café in Belfast's York Street late one wet and miserable Belfast night in 1974 with nowhere to stay. He got to speaking to a man who said he could stay in his house on the outskirts of the city. He was apprehensive but took up the offer. The next day the man took him to "some IRA headquarters" and introduced him to "some IRA staff" who gave him posters. The man said that his son was an arts teacher and later he sent Lillford these drawings by his son's pupils.
I tried to locate the former pupils of St Gabriel's but had no luck with Joseph McNally or Joseph McKenna. But I did get speaking to Kevin Fusco. He is now a furniture maker.
"I'm a bit shocked. I never thought I was that good," joked the 44-year-old. "But my daughter is big into art." He recalls his art teacher asking them to take part in a project, titled, 'What do you think about the Troubles', and it was supposed to appear in a book but he never heard anymore about it.
And what happened to Jim Donnelly whose painting hangs on a wall of the National Army Museum in London? Shortly after the 1981 hunger strike he was charged with dozens of other republicans, twenty-two of whom were sentenced to a total of 4,000 years in prison based on the word of supergrass Christopher Black.
From H-Block 7 in September 1983 Donnelly took part in the IRA takeover of the jail for the biggest IRA escape in republican history. However, he was quickly rearrested. Ironically, part of his Black conviction was overturned on appeal in 1986 but he was later sentenced for escaping and in total served seven years in jail.
He remembers a student arts teacher called Marcella inviting him and Kevin Fusco to take part in the project. They got off normal classes for a few days but he thought no more about it.
"It's funny my painting ending up on the wall of a British army museum," he joked. "Especially when you think of the wall I ended up behind!"]]>
Saturday August 30
10.30am Ferry departs from Ros a'Mhíl/Rosaveel to Inis Mór.
11.15am Ferry arrives in Cill Rónáin – Local transport to Kilmurvey House available outside Tourist Office. (Fare to be paid)
12.30pm – 2.00pm Kilmurvey House. (Tea and coffee available for purchase on arrival.)
Opening of the School by Seosamh Ó Cuaig, the chairperson of the Liam & Tom O'Flaherty Society. Seosamh Ó Cuaig is a writer, film maker, and broadcaster.
THE BRUTAL TRUTH, THE SLAUGHTER OF THE POOR: Theo Dorgan (pic, right), poet, writer, editor, translator, broadcaster and member of Aosdána reflects on the First World War, looking at themes in the writings of Liam O'Flaherty with particular reference to his novel The Return of the Brute.
Followed by a discussion.
2pm Lunch available in nearby restaurants.
3pm Local transport available to Tom O'Flaherty's grave í gCill Éinne. (Fare to be paid.)
4pm Commemoration at the grave of Tom O Flaherty.
• Address by Seosamh Ó Cuaig,
• Reading from Tom O'Flaherty's Aranmen All by Fionnghuala Ni Chonceanainn with Deirdre Ní Chonghaile on fiddle
• Sean-Nós lament sung by Treasa Ni Mhiolláin.
8pm Aran on Stage
Reading of Liam O'Flaherty's only play, Dorchhadas, by Aisteoirí Cois Fharraige, in Scoil Fhearann an Choirce, to be followed by a discussion.
Sunday 31 August
12 noon: Lecture at Tí Joe Mac in Cill Rónáin
Páipéar deireanach Thomáis Uí Fhlaithearta – 'An t-Éireannach' 1934-37′: Éamon Ó Ciosáin, NUI Maynooth, speaks on Tom O'Flaherty's Irish language articles in the radical 1930s newspaper An t-Éireannach.
Discussion entitled "Cuimhne ar Mhícheál Ó Maoláin— ceardchumannach as Árainn," led by Seosamh Ó Cuaig will follow.
Following the leacture and discussion, lunch will be available in local restaurants.
The Summer School Fee is €10 or €3 for attendance at inidvidual events. Admission is free to all paid up members of the the Liam & Tom O'Flaherty Society. Amount of contribution to local transport costs to be announced.
There are return sailings to Ros a Mhíl at 5pm and at 6.30pm on Sunday evening.
Just as it is possible to admire the fortitude and heroism of the Protestant defenders during the Siege of Derry in 1689, and yet regret the political legacy of their victory, so too should nationalists and republicans feel able to acknowledge the selflessness and patriotism of those thousands of Irish men and women who participated in the First World War.
Prior to 1914 the regular British army had many Irish regiments. Service, like emigration, was a means of escape from hunger and unemployment. However, after September 1914 there was a huge influx from the Irish Volunteers when the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, made a recruiting speech in favour of the British army.
The Irish Volunteers, established to support Home Rule, then split. The minority saw England's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity. But most marched off to war, believing naively that by fighting, Ireland would get a better post-war deal. The loyalists believed the same and they were correct.
Myles Dungan tells the story of the first Irish Division, the 10th, and the 16th, raised from the Irish Volunteers, and reprises that of the 36th Division – the old UVF – drawing on the diaries, letters and oral accounts of those who took part. It is horrifying and poignant: most of the military battles were a waste and pointless.
Landing at Gallipoli in a boat with 32 men, only six of whom got out alive, a Sergeant McColgan said: "One fellow's brains were shot into my mouth as I was shouting to them to jump for it." On another boat, 149 out of 200 were killed outright. Private Timothy Buckley recalled: "I stood counting them as they were going through. It was then I thought of peaceful Macroom, and wondered if I should ever see it again."
Of course, the slaughter wasn't all one-sided. A Lieutenant Guy Nightingale wrote to his sister: "When dawn broke, we saw them in hundreds retiring and simply mowed them down. We took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3,000 but we preferred shooting them. All the streams were simply running blood and the heaps of dead were a grand sight."
Almost 2,800 Irish men died at Gallipoli. When it was evacuated in December 1915 the Turks were still in possession.
Until I read this book I had only the vaguest comprehension of the extent of Irish involvement and the magnitude of the sacrifices. The Somme had been understandably appropriated and commemorated by the loyalists, and Suvla and Sudd-el-Bahr had reproachful connotations. (Indeed, the republican song 'The Foggy Dew' makes this very point, contrasting dying for Ireland in Ireland than for England in Gallipoli: "Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky/Than at Suvla or Sudd-el-Bahr".)
So although those names were familiar I had never heard of Guillemont or Ginchy or Messines or Salonika or the Third Battle of Gaza, the hundreds butchered here and there.
"Had nationalist Ireland taken a different political direction perhaps Gallipoli might occupy a place in the Irish psyche similar to that of the Australian," observes Dungan.
But the Ireland to which the survivors returned was in chaos, nationalist passions having been fired by the 1916 Easter Rising, the executions of its leaders, the threat of conscription. Few wanted to know their story. Many ex-servicemen would subsequently be shot as spies. Some, like Tom Barry, took their military skills into the fledgling Irish Republican Army. And what could be more ironical than the case of two former servicemen, Dunne and Sullivan, one of whom was lame from a war wound? Acting under orders from Michael Collins they assassinated in London Sir Henry Wilson, former chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1921. Arrested on the spot, they were tried and convicted and hanged, having fought in two wars for the freedom of small nations.
After the death of a comrade at the front, the Commanding Officer of the 6th Connaughts wondered would he and his men come to be considered 'saints or traitors,' little realising that they wouldn't' even come to be considered…
They Shall Not Grow Old – Irish Soldiers and the Great War by Myles Dungan
This is a companion volume to Myles Dungan's Irish Voices From the Great War and complements that anthology of tragedy with further stories of unromanticised life in the trenches, the experiences of PoWs, and an illuminating and critical look at the role of chaplins.
Incredibly, up to a quarter of a million Irishmen fought in the First World War. Dungan has already dealt fairly comprehensively with the loyalist 36th (Ulster) Division and here focuses more on Irish soldiers from the South. He has two objectives, both worthy. One, to record the sacrifice, sufferings and courage of these soldiers, the majority of whom believed they were advancing and securing Irish claims to Home Rule. The Act had been passed at Westminster but suspended until after the war. Two, to rectify the subsequent injustice the returnees experienced – non-recognition, public antipathy and animosity due to the political revolution (Easter 1916, Sinn Fein supplanting the Irish Parliamentary Party, the emergence of the IRA) that had taken place in their absence.
The World War I 'veteran', Dungan says, became indelibly associated with the other 'veterans' who made up the Tans and the Auxiliaries and who carried out atrocities. Commemoration and memory of the war became associated with support for the British administration in Ireland, just as in the North today the wearing of the Poppy is largely identified with the unionist cause.
He accuses subsequent generations and the state itself of 'culpable neglect'. There is certainly a case to be answered and most people, I believe, would be interested in finding a way of embracing this part of our history. My Granda Morrison and my mother's Uncle Paddy both took part. And just last year the West Belfast Festival sponsored a discussion around the controversial question, ''Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sed el Bahr'? One of the guest speakers was Gordon Lucey of the Somme Association.
A problem arises, however, because the more rabid of the revisionists (for example, Kevin Myers) come to this subject with their own political agenda. In seeking to create a sense of public guilt they seek more than rehabilitation. By exploiting the war dead and war veterans, by making disparaging comparisons between the warfare and sacrifices of those Irish who fought against the British and those who fought with the British abroad, they seek to return to the days when Pearse and Connolly were spat on as they were marched through the streets of Dublin. In their view the IRA's War of Independence should be rejected, its heroes tarnished (and in the process the cause of Irish reunification). The invective of the revisionists is deliberately aimed at making it difficult for those who do not share their political analysis to become embracive.
Dungan himself is not above exaggeration, linking the political defeat of Paddy Harte in his Donegal constituency (where he had been a TD for 36 years) with his wearing of a Poppy in Leinster House in 1996. I don't think so, Myles.
The descriptions of the war are horrific and heart-breaking. One soldier, Wallace Lyon, was given the task of disposing of over 300 bodies after a gas attack: "They were in all sorts of tragic attitudes, some of them holding hands like children in the dark." Another soldier, Patrick Downey, was sentenced to death for disobedience (he refused to put on his cap). On hearing of the verdict he allegedly laughed and shouted, 'That is a good joke. You let me enlist and then bring me out here and shoot me.' They shot him at dawn.
One of the most interesting chapters is The Foolish Dead, which deals with the soldier writers Tom Kettle (killed in September 1916), Francis Ledwidge (killed in July 1917), and Patrick Magill (author of 'Children of the Dead End', who died in the USA in 1940). Kettle was appalled by the actions of Pearse and Connolly, denouncing the Rising as madness. Yet after the murder of his brother-in-law, the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and the executions of the leaders, he knew his own position with the British Army at the Somme had lost its initial validity. Just before he was killed he wrote a sonnet for his little daughter. With poetry such as this as testimony, Kettle and his comrades will never be forgotten:
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
Oscar Wilde died twice. Of course his final resting place was in Père Lachaise, Paris, where he had succumbed to meningitis in 1900. But he had already died in London, his spirit crushed by a prison sentence of two years hard labour (1895-97) on a charge of gross indecency, this humiliation, this downfall having destroyed the brilliant, flamboyant Anglo-Irish writer.
Unwittingly, Wilde had forged some of the nails for his own coffin, in his own hand, by his own words, when he submitted the manuscript of The Portrait of Dorian Gray to the American publication, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, in June 1890. In this first version homosexual themes border on the explicit. But the second version, the British-published book of 1891, was a more circumspectly crafted text and included a Preface which attempted to negotiate his way around the initial criticisms that Dorian Gray was scandalous and immoral. Damaging quotes from the Lippincott's version, along with compromising letters, and the prospect of testimony from young male prostitutes, would later be used against Wilde in court by Edward Carson to discredit him and pave the way for his prosecution on charges of committing indecent acts.
Carson, like Wilde, a Protestant Dubliner and former fellow of Trinity College, was the leading barrister of his era. He was not only Wilde's Nemesis but, later, when he rose to political prominence, that of Irish nationalists. What a contrast between the lives of Wilde and Carson! One, a gifted artist who would hardly hurt a fly and who brought joy to thousands of readers and theatregoers and who would, after his death, be exonerated; the other, a skilled lawyer and consummate politician who would engage in illegal activity, threaten the will of parliament and bring immense suffering to the Irish nation, the repercussions of which are still felt today.
From 1911 Edward Carson became involved in subversion against the British government, opposed democratic Home Rule for Ireland, helped raise an illegal, paramilitary army (armed from Germany) and threatened civil war – all with impunity! When the First World War broke out, Carson's (Protestant) Ulster Volunteer Force largely converted into the British army's 36th (Ulster) Division; Carson became British Attorney General, a member of the War Cabinet and First Lord of the Admiralty. He was to symbolize the partition of Ireland, the man who sabotaged his country's independence.
Dorian Gray is the story of a young man selling his soul in a Faustian pact in exchange for eternal youth. The plot is quite staid: "all conversation and no action", as Wilde described it. Overtly, it is a novel of ideas about aesthetics, and the relation of passion to art. Wilde, a married family man but a practicing, covert homosexual for the four years prior to 1891, could not but help use his art to promulgate his ideas.
Those ideas (that it is right – healthier and cathartic – to give into temptations of the flesh) certainly aren't as monstrous as that suggested by Dostoyevsky's Smerdyakov's character, that "Everything is permitted", but they did outrage the Victorian establishment, Wilde's enemies and jealous critics. Wilde's unique wit, his affectation of speech, manner and eccentricity of dress, which was often ridiculed, incensed this section of society, the philistine majority, who allegedly practiced self-denial, and who viewed him as immoral and degenerate, but lacked the opportunity to humble and humiliate him.
It was a combination of Wilde's own hubris, and the encouragement of his lover, which set the scene.
One of those who read and was beguiled by Dorian Gray was Lord Alfred Douglas, a handsome young man, nicknamed 'Bosie', a spoilt and self-indulgent brat. He and Wilde were introduced in June 1891 and thereafter began an affair, often acting quite incautiously, though it was Alfred who was reckless and publicly flaunted himself so that they would be recognized as 'Oscar Wilde and his boy'. Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was outraged at what he considered was the corrupting of this son (though it was actually Alfred who introduced Wilde to the subterranean world of male prostitution), and when Wilde was challenged by Queensberry in June 1894 he denied the allegations. But in February 1895 the Marquess threw down the gauntlet in the form of a calling card left in Wilde's club, basically publicly accusing him of being a sodomite. Against wiser counsels, Wilde sued and Queensberry was arrested and charged with criminal libel.
However, during the trial, which began on 3rd April 1895, the tables were turned and Edward Carson, who was brilliant, eloquent and forensic in regard to highlighting 'immorality' in Wilde's work, including the Lippincott's version of Dorian Gray, easily demonstrated Wilde's licentious life and that he had an insatiable sexual appetite and predilection for young men. When Carson announced that he would produce male prostitutes as his witnesses who would testify to have having had sex with Wilde, Wilde dropped the prosecution. Not only did the court costs bankrupt him but the court ruled that the accusation that he was a sodomite was 'true in substance and in fact', and this triggered the next stage of the tragedy – his arrest on twenty-five counts of gross indecencies and conspiracy to commit gross indecencies.
His first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict.
(To be fair, at this stage Edward Carson appealed to the Solicitor General for clemency but was told it was too late as the case was now "too politicized" to stop. This is a reference to speculation that the British Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, had had a homosexual affair and was being threatened with exposure if he failed to aggressively prosecute Wilde.)
At the second trial, in May 1895, which heard lurid details and allegations of hotel sex with male prostitutes, Wilde and his co-accused, Alfred Taylor, were convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour.
Imprisonment broke Wilde. He experienced hunger, insomnia, disease, bouts of dysentery, loneliness, desertion, and the death of his mother. When being transferred in prison stripes to Reading Gaol a crowd gathered around him on the railway platform and jeered and spat at him. He wrote that he knew that when he would be released from prison that there was "nothing before me but a life of a pariah – of disgrace and penury and contempt."
His tragedy was the second occasion within a few years of a prominent Irish figure being brought down on the issue of morality. Charles Stewart Parnell, the greatest Irish politician of his era, was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster and appeared to be on the verge of achieving a measure of Home Rule (the Second Home Rule Bill). But, in 1890, in a London divorce case Parnell was named as co-respondent, as living with another man's wife with whom he had two children. The subsequent fallout from the scandal especially in Catholic Ireland, destroyed Parnell and bitterly divided his party. Meantime, others had become disillusioned with the failure of constitutional politics to deliver and were to go down the separatist road which would eventually lead to the 1916 Easter Rising and the formation of the IRA. Although the Irish Parliamentary Party had recovered by 1900 and looked again as if its lobbying at Westminster would finally result in the passing of a Home Rule Act, onto the stage strode Sir Edward Carson to thwart their Irish aspirations.
Wilde was released in May 1897 and immediately went into exile, unaware that history and public opinion would exonerate him. His writings are celebrated, his plays constantly performed and attract new admirers, his life the object of biographers, and his epigrams (used to blacken him at this trial) regularly quoted in books, in film and in the media. In Ireland and Britain today homosexuality has been decriminalized and gay partnerships/marriages are recognized. In another ironic twist, the newspaper symbolic of Rupert Murdoch's modern global media empire, the News of the World, which throughout its 168-year-old history specialized in scandal, salacious stories and prurience, and which rejoiced in Wilde's imprisonment and downfall, itself was brought down by scandal in 2011 and court cases! Police revealed that the newspaper was involved in widespread phone hacking of royal, public and celebrity figures, of the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and of the families of teenage girls who had been raped and murdered.
Against this history, in hindsight, who truly was the more moral but Saint Oscar?
Dr Jörg Rademacher, in as forensically a manner as Carson indicted Wilde, liberates Wilde from the censuring and self-censorship Wilde himself, for motives of self-protection, futilely wrought on his novel in the various stages of production. Rademacher, as he explains, distills the variant texts to produce a new edition of the old but original Dorian, a reconstruction of the uncensored wording of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It presents us with a unique insight into the parturition of a work, the struggle that takes place between true, unencumbered, artistic freedom and powerful social forces which compromise such work – for better or worse, but rarely for better.]]>
At the end of Part I, our hero Jim Mitchell is leaving for England and looks over to the County Down coast where he and his friends had so many happy summer weekends:
'The ship was moving out into the Irish Sea, ploughing swiftly and powerfully through the furrowed, infinte dark heaving mass of water. We saw the lighthouse beam close by, stabbing the wild black darkness. Lighthouse Island! Then the indistinct shape of our island. It was strange to think of the little wooden house huddled there in its cove facing out to sea, its dark interior illuminated momentarily by each stroke of the lighthouse beam; the empty dark rooms filled with the ghosts of those carefree youthful years of friendship and carousal, guitars and girls around the crackling driftwood fire -.'
16th July. Interviewed on Nolan Show with Alex Kane about the amount of street drinking in Belfast on the Twelfth and whether it is any different to other events where crowds drink at concerts or on St Patrick's Day.
15th July. Interviewed by Augusto Gazir Soares, who is doing an MA in Anthropology at QUB, and his final dissertation is about "social media, politics and humour in Northern Ireland".
10th July. At the launch of Féile's August festival programme.
2nd July. In Sligo for the funeral of my friend, the poet and writer, Dermot Healy (below), who had given me much encouragement for many years and who wrote to me while I was in prison – something that no prisoner ever forgets.
28th June. At funeral of Gerry Conlon (formerly Guildford Four) who tragically died a week ago from a short illness. He had been a year below me at St Peter's School.
26th June. Interviewed on the Nolan Show with Alex Kane re Haass proposal of a Troubles Museum.
18th June. Began work on reading and judging over three hundred short stories from schools in Belfast.
17th June. Interviewed by Peter Krause, a Research Fellow at Harvard University, who was in Belfast to conduct fieldwork for a university press book on 'the internal politics of the Irish national movement, 1968 – 2001'.
Interviewed by BBC South East about the informer, the discredited Raymond Gilmour, making claims to have 'new' information about the IRA and Martin McGuinness from the 1980s.
16th June. Interviewed by John Braithwaite, Australian National University, for Peacebuilding Compared, about the root causes of the conflict in the North of Ireland and what has been effective and ineffective in dealing with them.
13th June. Interviewed by Christophe Boltanski, a French journalist with Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly French newsmagazine, who is writing a story on truth and reconciliation.
Spoke at a Féile an Phobail event in Cultúrlann; introduced by Gerry Adams and gave my Féile Schwanengesang as retired chair.
12th June. Did second part of interview with Marissa McGlinchey who is writing a study of dissident republicans.


text:
Comments from angelharley
|Story title
|2011-07-16 00:41:17
|A good nite
|great work, now u can try to find my story. it's on my online profile just like yours is, and i found your online profile and got to read your story. if not let me know and i will just re-type the whole thing into the thread for the forum. :)
|2011-07-25 02:44:10
|I'm hot for my older sister 6 (and my MOM, too!)...The Final Chapter
|loved the story all the way, it made me horny. i wish i had a brother, hehe. maybe u can do more stories like that... thanks again. u did great!!
|2011-08-02 02:17:07
|My Crush
|i want the rest of it!!! I want to read that he got to do it with his crush!!
|2011-08-12 02:03:26
|Dorm Life
|I would love for you to give us another chapter. What happens in the rest of the dorm life? Does he get to have Alex? Good story, but I want to know the rest. LOL. Thanks!!
|2011-08-25 01:36:56
|hot naughty punishing story, some girls must like to be slaves. hehe :)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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Citrus-Scented Geranium Cookies >
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Nutritional Facts
Citrus-Scented Geranium Cookies
Geraniums are one of my favorite flowers. Not only are they beautiful garden accents, but they can enhance any culinary dish. Any scented geranium leaf can be used in this cookie recipe.
36 Servings
Prep: 25 min. + chilling Bake: 10 min./batch + cooling
1 cup butter, softened
1-1/2 cups confectioners' sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons finely chopped lemon-, lime-,
orange geranium petals
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon
McCormick® Pure Vanilla Extract
1/8 teaspoon
McCormick® Pure Almond Extract
2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 cup confectioners' sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 to 3 teaspoons water
1/4 teaspoon
McCormick® Pure Vanilla Extract
In a large bowl, cream butter and confectioners' sugar. Beat in the
egg, geranium leaves, lemon juice and extracts. Combine the flour,
baking soda and cream of tartar; gradually add to creamed mixture.
Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours or until easy to handle.
Divide dough in half. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each
© Taste of Home 2014
2 of 2
Citrus-Scented Geranium Cookies
Directions (continued)
portion to 1/4-in. thickness. Cut with a 2-in. cookie cutter dipped
in sugar. Place 2 in. apart on greased baking sheets. Bake at
375° for 9-10 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Remove
to wire racks to cool. In a small bowl, combine glaze ingredients.
Brush over cooled cookies. Yield: 3 dozen.
Nutritional Facts:
1 serving (1 each) equals 112 calories, 5 g fat (3 g saturated fat), 20 mg cholesterol, 88 mg sodium, 15 g carbohydrate, trace fiber, 1 g protein.
Sweet White Wine: Enjoy this recipe with a sweet white wine such as
or a sweet
© Taste of Home 2014


text:
November 28, 2014
Wil Kamin kicked a 20-yard field goal on the first series of overtime to lead Richmond past James Madison 13-10 in Colonial Athletic Association play Saturday.
The Spiders (5-4, 3-3) kept James Madison off the scoreboard on its first overtime possession thanks to a five-yard delay-of-game penalty and a 14-yard sack by Tyler Sullivan. The Dukes failed to convert a fourth-and-30 from the Richmond 45-yard line.
Jamal Sullivan gave the Dukes (4-5, 1-5) a 7-0 lead in the first quarter after a 12-yard touchdown run.
Richmond tied the score 7-7 with a 41-yard touchdown pass from John Laub to Tre Gray midway through the second quarter.
Dixon Wright kicked a 21-yard field goal to give James Madison a 10-7 halftime lead.
Kamin booted an 18-yard field goal in the third quarter that ultimately sent the game into overtime.
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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|List A - Z | Top 1000 | Random | Origins
KorrinRate Korrin: Do you like this name?
Get creative with Korrin | Add to list (0)
Korrin meaning and name origin
Korrin \k(or)-rin\ as a girl's name (also used as boy's name Korrin), has the meaning "maiden" and is a variant of Corinne (Greek): French form of Corinna, also used in the English-speaking world. Also a variant of Korina (Greek): variant of Corinna.
Korrin has 25 variant forms: Carinne, Carrine, Coreen, Corene, Corine, Corrin, Corrine, Corrinne, Corryne, Corynn, Kareen, Karene, Karine, Karinne, Karrine, Karyne, Kerrine, Koreen, Korine, Korinne, Korrine, Korrinne, Koryn, Korynn, Korynne.
Korrin is also pronounced similarly to Carrin, Corin, Corrinn, Corryn, Karin, Karren, Karrin, Karryn, Kerin, Kerran, Kerrin, Kerron, Kerryn, Koren and Korin. Other suggested similar baby names are Karrina, Korri, Korrie, Korrina and Lorrin.
View a list of the 2 names that reference Korrin.
Popularity of Korrin
Korrin is not a popular first name for females and an equally uncommon surname or last name for all people (2000 U.S. Census).
Displayed below is the baby names popularity of Korrin name for girls (2012 statistics). Compare Korrin with its variant forms and related girl baby names.
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27th Annual Mopars with Big Daddy
November 1-2, 2014
Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing
13700 SW 16th Ave
Ocala, FL 34473
Here at AAR Quality Fiberglass Reproductions we specialize in Fiberglass Custom Mopar Hoods and parts. Now partnered with Stinger Fiberglass for even more makes and models for all of your muscle car restoration.
We ARE the place to shop for your Custom Fiberglass After Market Parts that include Hoods, Bumpers, Body Kits and Spoilers.
You can place your order online anytime or by phone at 321-268-1118 Monday thru Friday 8am til 5pm EST.
When ordering multiple items please contact us as we may be able to provide a lower shipping rate quote.


text:
- Casa Bonita, Santa Cruz de Barahona, Dominican Republic
- Hacienda Encantada Resort & Spa, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
- Santa Barbara Beach & Golf Resort, Newport, Curaçao
- Kukuiula Club Cottages, The Parrish Collection Kauai, Poipu Beach, Kauai
- Casas del XVI, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Le Montrose Suites West Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
- Sandos Cancun Luxury Experience Resort, Cancun, Mexico
- La Giralda, Guanaja, Honduras
1 of 7 | Next photo
Hotel St. Francis
Santa Fe, New MexicoEnter your email address and zip code for pricing and availability
Why Stay At Hotel St. Francis
Santa Fe's mission-style Hotel St. Francis is within walking distance of the historic plaza, the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, and the Palace of the Governors.
The Scoop
Though this 81-room hotel is set just one block from Santa Fe's main plaza, it's as if the calming spirit of St. Francis, the hotel's namesake and the patron saint of the city, has cast a serene spell on this historic hideaway. Yes, there's the Spicy Secreto, the Secreto Bar's signature cocktail comprised of Cabana Cachaca, St. Germain elderflower liqueur, cucumber, and jalapeno; otherwise, the mood throughout the Mission-style property is decidedly quiet, thanks to tiered chandeliers and cast-iron wall scones that create a tranquil, romantic feel. Rooms are equally as subdued, with rough-hewn floors and weathered wood furnishings, all of which was crafted by local artisans using traditional methods from Mexico and Spain.
Insider Tips
Secreto Bar's mixologist, Chris Milligan, uses fresh fruits and vegetables to craft unique cocktails like the Cucumber Collins or gin-based Basil-ica, which incorporates for fresh basil.
Don't miss the daily high tea, when chef Estevan, a former Franciscan monk, serves goat milk flan and pastelles de tres leches (a moist Mexican cake).
Preferred Airport
Arrive at Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF) which is approximately 12 miles from the hotel. Anticipate about 25 minutes of travel time.210 Don Gaspar Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Hotel FeaturesBack to Top Property Amenities
- High-speed Internet Access
- Fitness Center
- In-room Spa Treatments
- Business Center
- Pet Friendly
- 24-hour Front Desk
- Concierge Service
- Laundry Service
- Smoke-free Property
- Walking Tours from Hotel
- Complimentary Wi-Fi
- Flat-screen Cable TVs
- Individually controlled A/C
- Pillow top Mattresses
- Down Comforters
- Desks
- Mini Fridge (request)
- In-room Safes
- Steamers
- Coffeemakers
- Luxury Bath Amenities
- Hair Dryers
- Non-Smoking Rooms
- Restaurant
- Outdoor Dining
- Bar + Lounge
- In-room Dining
Updating Results
- Maximum occupancy for both room is 2 adults and 1 child sharing existing bedding
- Split of Gruet Champagne
Why We Love Santa Fe
Despite its vibrant population of skiers and hikers, painters and photographers, alternative healers, and hippies, this city remains strongly connected to its Spanish-Native American heritage—and to the pristine landscape that surrounds it.
Don't Miss
150 Washington Ave.
Read More
Dinner for two from $50.
Where to Drink: Flamenco dancers, live music, and a standout wine list are the staples at Santa Fe's oldest lounge and restaurant, El Faro. Wines from around the world, including New Mexico's own Gruet Blanc de Noir Cava, are served during nightly dance performances.
808 Canyon Rd.
Read More
Drinks for two from $25.
Best Day Trip: The Tewa Indian and Hispanic arts communities operate shops and artists' galleries in Chimayó, a 30-minute drive north in the Sangre de Cristo foothills. Head there for natural dyed woolens and folk art, such as retablos (paintings of saints on wood).
Read More
Santa Fe's San Miguel Mission.
Why Go Now
September 16, 2012
Burning of Zozobra and Santa Fe Fiesta
The streets are filled with joyous shouts of "Viva la Fiesta" when the oldest community event in the U.S. takes place.
Santa Fe Plaza and various venues.
October 6-7, 2012
Harvest Festival
Celebrate at a living history museum dedicated to the heritage and culture of Spanish Colonial New Mexico.
El Rancho de las Golondrinas. 334 Los Pinos Road.
December 6-9, 2012
Santa Fe Film Festival
Showcases films made in the Southwest as well as independent American-made narrative films, films made outside the U.S., documentaries and art films celebrating the creative spirit.


text:
BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites
187 Kern Street, Salinas, CA 93905-2016
Phone: 831/751-6411 | Fax: 831/751-6890 | 62 Rooms
Check Out Time: 11:00 AM | Check In: 3:00 PM | Online Reservations
Visit our hotel in Salinas, California, the BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites, to enjoy a comfortable stay near top activities and attractions.
You'll enjoy every minute of your visit to our Salinas hotel, thanks to our array of high quality amenities, starting with the outdoor heated pool, spa and steam room. Don't forget to enjoy our free, full breakfast, which includes hot eggs, meat, pastries, coffee and more. With free Wi-Fi and a business center that offers copy, fax and computer services, you'll have everything you need to stay connected on your journey.
Located off of Highway 101, our central California hotel has 17 suites for extra space and comfort, some of which features its own hot tub and others featuring two separate rooms. All guest rooms boast cable TV with HBO®, microwaves, mini refrigerators and desk areas.
You'll find no shortage of things to do and see near our hotel in the Monterey Bay area, including the popular Salinas Rodeo and the Salinas Pro National Motorcycle Races at the nearby Salinas Sports Complex. We're located very close to Historic Downtown Salinas, the Steinbeck Center, Monterey Bay Aquarium and the famous Laguna Seca Raceway, so you can enjoy a wide variety of activities. Don't forget to check out the California International Air show at the Salinas Municipal Airport or the many car shows and races nearby. Then, of course, there are the beaches of Monterey Peninsula which offer the perfect place to relax and catch some sun by the cool Pacific Ocean.
Those traveling for business will enjoy our Salinas hotel's close proximity to government offices, courthouses, agricultural companies and healthcare providers. We also offer meeting and conference facilities for those who need it.
Book your stay at the BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites today, to experience all that the beautiful central California coast has to offer near our Salinas hotel!
Hotel Amenities & Services
- Exercise facilities
- Complimentary full breakfast, choice of breads, cereal, fruit, hot eggs, hot breakfast meat, other hot items, yogurt, juice, and coffee.
- Complimentary breakfast
- Outdoor pool, heated
- Spa
- Steam room
- Exercise facility, open from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
- Multilingual staff (English, Spanish)
- Hearing-impaired services
- 100% smoke free hotel
- Guest laundry
- Ice/vending machines
- Elevator
- Safe deposit box - 24-hour access
- Free parking
- Meeting facilities
- Fax services
- Photocopy services
- Interior corridor
- Parking for the physically challenged
- Outdoor parking
- High-speed Internet access
BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites
Take advantage of the savings and fun with this special offer available at the best western plus salinas valley inn & suites in Salinas.
BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites
Conveniently located, the best western plus salinas valley inn & suites in Salinas, California is shown on the map. Detailed driving directions from popular points or nearby cities are listed below. For those with GPS, here you go:
Longitude: 36.681605 / Latitude: -121.641715
Driving Directions to Hotel
From: The south. Take 101 North and exit on Market Street, then make a left on Kern. The BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites is on the left-hand side at the end of the street.
From: The north. Take 101 south and exit Market Street, then go left on Market St and left turn on Kern St. The BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites is on the left-hand side at the end of the street.
BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites
We care about the quality of your stay with us. Below are nearby attractions, shopping and restaurants that are popular with our guests. Listed locations are nearby with approximate distance listed where available.
Most Popular Area Attractions
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca Race Track
With over two miles of paved track, the Laguna Seca Race Track is located just outside the central California coast of Salinas.
Pinnacles National Monument
The Pinnacles National Monument, located in Paicines, is the site of ancient volcano remains, spires and sheer-walled canyons. Bring your hiking and rock climbing gear for an afternoon of fun. While hiking on some of the thirty miles of trails, keep a watchful eye for the endangered California condor. The monument is a release site for the birds and they are seen frequently.
Flashlights or head-lamps are needed to hike into the two Talus Caves: Balconies Cave and Bear Gulch Cave. Also enjoy a guided tour, evening campfire program or ranger talk from the NPS staff. Convenient lodging is available 40 miles from the Monument with Best Western in Salinas. Have fun exploring the California Central Coast.
More Area Attractions & Services
- 1.00 mile(s) from Steinbeck National Museum
- 2.00 mile(s) from California Rodeo
- 2.00 mile(s) from California Air Show
- 15.00 mile(s) from Laguna Seca Raceway
- 25.00 mile(s) from Carmel by the Sea
- 25.00 mile(s) from Monterey Jazz Festival
- 25.00 mile(s) from Monterey Bay Aquarium
- 25.00 mile(s) from Cannery Row
- 27.00 mile(s) from Gilroy Garlic Festival
Distances to Popular Points of Interest
- 15 mile(s) from Soledad
- 25 mile(s) from Monterey
- 27 mile(s) from Carmel
- 27 mile(s) from Pacific Grove
- 30 mile(s) from Gilroy
- 30 mile(s) from Hollister
- 45 mile(s) from San Jose
- 45 mile(s) from King City
Local Area Recreation Opportunities
- Spa
- Steam room
- 1.00 mile(s) from Salinas Sports Complex
- 2.00 mile(s) from Salinas Valley Golf
Nearby Restaurants
- You can enjoy popular chain restaurants and unique local fare near our hotel in Salinas. Learn about close by places to eat.
- 2.00 mile(s) from Applebee's, American
- 5.00 mile(s) from Gino's, Italian
- Adjacent to Margie's Diner, American
- Adjacent to In-N-Out® Burger
BEST WESTERN PLUS Salinas Valley Inn & Suites
Enjoy your stay with us even more by checking out some of the most popular area points of interest and local area events happening in or near Salinas. Chase the links to explore the local region even more.
Local Events Worth Considering:
November 2014
Christmas at Hearst Castle
Experience one of California's most famous attractions, Hearst Castle, decorated in Christmas splendor. Be sure to take the Grand Rooms Tour and the Evening Tour.
December 2014
Annual Downtown Santa Barbara Holiday Parade
Join over 50,000 spectactors and watch one of the most thrilling holiday parades in the country. Kick-off is at 6:30 p.m. on State Street, from Sola to Cota.
Monterey Brighten the Harbor Boat Parade
Decorated boats cruise along the coast of Monterey Bay for everyone's enjoyment. Find a good spot and enjoy the show, which kicks off at 5:30 p.m.
January 2015
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
Hollywood stars descend onto Santa Barbara for this world-renowed festival, which features everything from mainstream to indie films.
February 2015
San Luis Obispo Culinary Carnival
Experience delightful food at this social mixer and live auction paired with the regions finest micro-brews and wine.
Pebble Beach Pro Am
The world's premier PGA TOUR pro-am kicks off on the Monterey Peninsula's world-class golf links.
August 2015
Monterey Car Week & Concours D'Elegance
The world-famous Monterey Car Week takes over the whole town. Don't miss car shows and famous rallies, like the Concours D'Elegance.
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Grinder Gym
Downtown YMCA
Gold's Gym
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Women's Swimming Finishes RMC Invitational in Third Place
Sunday, December 08, 2013
Chesterfield, Va. – Marymount University's women's swimming team finished the Randolph-Macon Invitational in third place after the second day of competition on Saturday. The Saints earned 481 total points during the event.
Marymount won four individual events on the second day, including Casey Thomas setting a meet record in the 100 freestyle. She posted a time of 53.60 in the event.
The Saints opened competition as the team of Taylor Hood, Jessica Hester, Bridget Wunderly and Katie Moran placed fourth in the 200 medley relay while Lauren Funk, Kaitlyn Eyler, Kassidy Schmidt and Isabella Blecha posted a 10th place finish.
Opening individual events, Wunderly placed second in the 100 butterfly before Thomas won her first event of the day in the 200 freestyle with Hanna Del Signore coming in ninth. Hester added a sixth place finish in the 100 breaststroke in the next event.
Marymount put together a dominating performance in the 100 backstroke. Hood won the event with Schmidt coming in third, Funk eighth and Moran 10th. The Saints closed out the first session with a second place showing in the 800 freestyle relay from Wunderly, Moran, Del Signore and Thomas.
In the second session, Schmidt picked up another win for the Blue and White in the 200 backstroke while Funk and Eyler placed seventh and ninth, respectively. Thomas followed suit with her record-setting performance in the 100 freestyle with Moran coming in fourth.
Wrapping up individual performances, Hester placed seventh in the 200 breaststroke and Wunderly was third in the 200 butterfly.
Marymount went on to close things out with a third place finish in the 400 medley relay by the squad of Moran, Del Signore, Wunderly and Thomas.
Marymount returns to action after the New Year as it takes on Catholic and Washington & Lee in a double-dual meet on January 18 in Washington, D.C.
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