The complete photo will follow: this is Slice A, including the class teacher. Tom Wharton has been good enough to contribute here regularly. Payback time! We have found his old school photo! We will show it in 4 slices, A B C and D. This is C because it includes Tom! Newry Film Club’s new season of films for 2011-12 begins on Wednesday 5th October in Newry Arts Centre with the thriller ‘Unknown’ starring Liam Neeson. We are starting at the earlier time of 7.30pm … The smutty and libellous doggerel quoted below, and widely published at the time, demonstrates the extent to which the ‘establishment’ would go in 1832 to blacken the emerging Catholic political class. The list of names of Catholic Newry electors (2/2) of 1832 reproduced here is more interesting in a variety of ways to us 180 years later, than was its original intent (which was to intimidate Catholic electors who had failed to vote for the Catholic Dennis Maguire). The following list of names of allegedly recalcitrant Catholic electors of the Borough of Newry in the 1832 election to Parliament (Imperial) was printed and produced to punish, by intimidation, those who had failed to wrest the seat from the agents of the landlord, the Earl of Downshire. Henry Joy McCracken’s political activities alarmed the authorities and they concluded that he was one of the more dangerous of the United Irishmen conspirators. The traffic was stopped in every direction, waiting for us .. or for the donkey. Everybody came up with ideas or gave a hand. Would that donkey put a foot on the wooden bridge? No. It was like Delaney’s donkey in that song. One of the town’s great characters, T’as Murphy of Dromalane has agreed to share a few reminiscences on Journal with us. We are honoured. Henry Joy McCracken was – like most of his family – a textiles manufacturer by profession. He ought to have succeeded, specialising in cotton, but his radical political outlook led to his neglect of his business, and Joy, Holmes & McCracken went to the wall. In the Old Chapel graveyard there is a family plot belonging to the O’Hare family. It is close to the spot where my wife’s family is interred. When we would go to visit that grave… Henry Joy McCracken was, at least by modern standards, a very unlikely rebel. From a well-to-do family, the young Henry Joy branched out (his father was a ship owner and rope maker) into the most lucrative trade of the time, cotton manufacture. 1960 residents of Barrack Street (runs between Canal Street and Linenhall Square) Confusion, after the calling-off of ‘manoeuvres’ by the Irish Volunteers leader Eoin McNeill, and the subsequent lack of manpower on that Easter Monday caused great confusion and consternation in the implementation of Plunkett’s IRB insurrection plans of 1916. Altnaveagh School 1947-8 : A
Altnaveigh School ’47-’48 ‘C’
Newry Film Club: New Season
Electoral canvassing of old
1830s Catholic electors
Newry Elections 1830s
Rebellion begins : Henry Joy
T’as outwits the donkey … and Junk!
T’as Murphy and the donkey
Henry Joy : 3
Flu of 1918
Henry Joy McCracken (2)
1960 Barrack Street
Michael Mallin remembered
