Historical figures we should know about but don't

For the week that is in it, James Hoban, Kilkenny man (from Callan) who designed the White House and was the supervising architect on the building of the Capital building in DC.

Chaim Herzog, from Portobello in Dublin who became President of Israel. His father spoke fluent Irish and was known as the "Sinn Fein Rabbi"

and lastly, Margaret Eager from Limerick, governess to the children of Tsar Nicholas the second who were all executed by the Communists (she was back in Ireland at that stage)
 
Excellent Peanuts. I hadn't heard of Margaret Eager.
 
Peanuts20 said:
For the week that is in it, James Hoban, Kilkenny man (from Callan) who designed the White House and was the supervising architect on the building of the Capital building in DC.
Click to expand...

And for a nice bit of symmetry on the day that's in it, I nominate Robert Ross. Major-General in the British Army in the 1812 war against the United States, native of Rostrevor, County Down, he was the second last man to lead an invasion of Capitol Hill in Washington. Ross commanded the forces that captured Washington DC, and burned both the White House and the Capitol Building.

Later in the same war, he kept Francis Scott Key as an overnight hostage/prisoner/guest on board HMS Tonnant during the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the crown forces. "By the dawn's early light," Key saw the stars and stripes still flying over the fort, put pen to paper and, well, the rest is history.

Quite a serendipitous turn of events. In a further twist, Ross is commemorated with a portrait in the Capitol Rotunda. I'm sure few, if any, of the insurgents would have recognized him or known that the man looking down on them made a rather better fist of attacking the place than they did and also played a Key (see what I did there) part in giving them their national anthem.
 

I'd never heard of him but was passing through Rostrevor last summer and there's a fine obelisk dedicated to the General.
The plaque made for fascinating reading... and the view from the look out point out towards Carlingford Lough is beautiful.
 
odyssey06 said:
I'd never heard of him but was passing through Rostrevor last summer and there's a fine obelisk dedicated to the General.
The plaque made for fascinating reading... and the view from the look out point out towards Carlingford Lough is beautiful.
Click to expand...
Yes, gorgeous views alright. According to this website Ross had planned to build his retirement home on that spot. http://themanwhocapturedwashington.com/ross-monuments/
 
A 98-year-old woman living in Co Mayo, has been given a special US House of Representatives honour in Belmullet this evening, for the role she played in changing the course of world history with her weather reports. Maureen Sweeney, who is originally from Co Kerry, forecast an impending storm from Blacksod station in 1944 which changed the timing of the D-Day landings and ultimately secured victory for the Allies.

Mayo's D-Day heroine receives special US honour

A 98-year-old woman living in Co Mayo, has been given a special US House of Representatives honour in Belmullet this evening, for the role she played in changing the course of world history with her weather reports.
www.rte.ie
 
Brigadier General James Wolfe Ripley - the Union Army’s chief of the Ordnance Bureau in the American Civil War.

"It was largely due to his efforts that the over 2 million Union soldiers who served during the war were consistently well armed with standard muzzle-loading rifle-muskets and supplied with plenty of ammunition. Yet Ripley’s failure to ride the wave of new technology meant that the war dragged on longer than it should have, thereby producing a higher cost in lives."

This is one story about him:
President Lincoln had to go to Ripley’s office and give his ordnance chief direct orders to buy the new weapons. Although Ripley grudgingly complied, he then did his best to sabotage the purchase contracts by inserting an egregious “fine print” clause that would cancel any order that was even one day late in delivery.This proved to be especially effective obstructionism considering the inevitable delays the new companies experienced as they wrestled with unfamiliar technologies. Ripley’s correspondence reveals his continual effort to cancel all orders for repeating weapons by unfairly exaggerating a few delivery failures or development problems. Yet field commanders were so desperate for the new rapid-fire weapons that some of them armed their units with repeaters personally purchased by their troops or officers.

Civil War Firepower Denied!

The Union Army’s chief of ordnance sabotaged the introduction of repeating weapons. The Civil War has been called the first “modern war” and is credited
www.historynet.com
 
Bumping this thread as didn't know where else to put this trivia tidbit...

He was played by Kenneth More in "A Night To Remember" & the Mark Rylance character in 2017 Dunkirk film was inspired by him.

In the midst of observances of Dunkirk, OTD in 1940, my mind turns to Charles Lightoller (1874-1952), senior surviving officer of the Titanic. Not content with an active #WW1 (DSC & bar), aged 66 he took his motor yacht, Sundowner, to Dunkirk, rescuing 130 troops in a single trip

 
Bumping this thread to cover the Cook sisters, who used their love of opera to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis in the 1930s.

Covered in BBC podcast Historys Secret Heroes narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. 30 minute episode.

A later episode will cover Emily Anderson, a musicologist from Galway and her codebreaking work for the Allies.

BBC Radio 4 - History's Secret Heroes, 11. The Extraordinary Cook Sisters

How did two English opera-loving sisters help dozens of Jews escape Nazi Germany?
www.bbc.co.uk
 
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Adrian Carton de Wiart, born in Belgium to Irish and Belgian parents, retired to, died and is buried in Aghinagh House, county Cork. He fought in the Bore War, the First World War and the Second World War. He was shot 11 times, losing his eye and arm in the process. AT 62 years of age the plane he was travelling in was shot down and crashed into the sea. The one eyes and one armed de Wiart swam ashore and was captured by the Italians. He was the highest ranking British Prison of War, and the highest ranking British soldier to escape from a POW camp when he, along with a group of senior officers who had been on the plane, dug a tunnel and attempted to reach Switzerland. When the Italians were surrendering they released him to help negotiate it. He was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of King Leopold of Belgium. He's worth reading up on.
 
Sir John Harington, inventor of the modern flushing toilet. Yes, it was him and not Thomas Crapper. Crapper invented the U-Bend but not the flushing toilet. The flushing toilet is one of the most significant inventions of all time. It allowed cities to grow and thrive without the disease that, quite literally, used to plague them. Harrington should be up there with Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch as the people who helped conquer the diseases that were so common in cities in the developed world for so long. Diarrheal still kills nearly a half a million people each year in places where there is bad sanitation. We can thank Harrington for helping save us from that (and the stink that used to envelop cities).
 
Wasn't sure where else to put this... thought it might appeal to same audience.

From The New Yorker July 1944 cover depicting the D-Day invasion in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Seen on TwitterX https://x.com/mcpli/status/1799425482901037086/photo/1


 
Reading an interesting article in The Smithsonian Magazine about Stephen Allen Benson, President of Liberia during the American Civil War.
The sudden demand for more coffee as a crucial army provision combined with the blockade of the Southern ports created a crisis.
Hoping to help the North, and help his youthful country to prosper, he arranged deals to ensure the North were well supplied with coffee.

The North had a 'caffeinated' edge on the march and battlefields.

Meanwhile Confederates had to make do with make do with unpalatable coffee substitutes brewed from acorn grounds, sweet potatoes and other dubious ingredients. Military discipline was reportedly difficult to maintain in the Confederate Army, where, one Union soldier noted, “they get no
tea or coffee but plenty of whiskey.”

The war had a long term impact on US coffee drinking:
The U.S. coffee market, in turn, was forever changed by the war. Indeed, Smithsonian curator of political history Jon Grinspan says that drinking coffee three times a day had hooked America’s soldiers, with the enlisted men “developing lifelong peacetime habits while camped at Shiloh
or Petersburg.” By 1885, the U.S. was importing 11 pounds of coffee per person, per year—nearly double prewar levels.

How Coffee Helped the Union Caffeinate Their Way to Victory in the Civil War

The North’s fruitful partnership with Liberian farmers fueled a steady supply of an essential beverage
www.smithsonianmag.com
 
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