Around the time of the foundation of the Irish state it would probably have come as a surprise to many Irish people that the author of ‘that filthy book’ My Life and Loves, the notorious Frank Harris, was a compatriot. But indeed he was. The only mitigating factor in his otherwise unrelievedly Irish origins was that his parents were Welsh, his father being a naval officer from Fishguard. Though this probably had little to do with his voracious sexual appetite and his repeated committal of his sexual history to paper. He had a reputation in the 1890s of being ‘the best talker in London’ at a time when Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill provided stiff competition for the title.

Harris, feted by a few as a writer who pushed out the boundaries of journalism and loathed by many as a rampant pornographer, was born in 1856 in Galway. It was his departure from Ireland at the tender age of twelve that began the process that would result in the publication of My Life and Loves. He was sent to school in Wales, didn’t like it, and ran away after a year. Most callow teenagers would have headed for Cardiff …  or London if they were more adventurous. Harris, however, travelled instead to America. There he held down a number of menial jobs before finding his feet in the American west in the 1870s by working as a cowboy.

He was inveigled into that hazardous profession by a man known only as Mexican Bob.  The dangers of the open range included weather, wildlife (literally and metaphorically), water, women, weapons and wrongdoing. Despite his subsequent notoriety Harris managed to avoid the metaphorical wildlife, his youth meant he steered clear of cow-town women and a range of colourful and painful venereal diseases. But he almost succumbed to the literal variety when bitten by a rattlesnake. Only the attentions of two colleagues kept him alive. As in much of his literary output Harris was prone to exaggerate his western adventures. He describes, for example, one incident in which he claimed that he and four other cowboys managed to hold off a one hundred strong raiding party of Native Americans.

Returning to the UK Harris became a successful journalist, his greatest achievement probably being his editorship of the Saturday Review, a periodical which included H.G.Wells and George Bernard Shaw as contributors.

Harris became an American citizen in 1921 and the following year travelled to post-war Berlin where he began publishing, privately, the four volumes of biography / erotica for which he is most notorious.  His descriptions of his alleged sexual encounters, highly graphic for the time and accompanied by illustrations that left nothing to the imagination, resulted in the book being widely banned. Inevitable comparisons were made with D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Love.  In the US and Britain the ban lasted for over forty years. In addition to describing and probably greatly exaggerating his own sex life he also discussed the nocturnal activities of, amongst others, Charles Stewart Parnell, Randolph Churchill and William E.Gladstone.

Harris numbered Oscar Wilde among his friends. He, sensibly as it turned out, advised Wilde against suing the Marquis of Queensberry for defamation in the trial that destroyed the Irish playwright. Wilde had dedicated his play An Ideal Husband to Harris. So ill-suited was Harris to that particular designation, he was married three times, that we might well assume the playwright had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he did so. Harris also wrote a, not entirely favourable, biography of Wilde. He died, in 1931, of a heart attack at the age of 75.

Frank Harris, cowboy, editor, biographer, and bon vivant was born 158 years ago on this day.

Brendan Behan was born in Dublin’s inner city in 1923. He inherited his love of literature from his father, a house-painter who had fought in the War of Independence, and much of his Republicanism from his mother Kathleen, a sister of Peadar Kearney, the man who wrote Amhran na bFhiann.

Behan was politically active from an early age and was also publishing as a teenager. He was one of the youngest contributors to the Irish Press, for example, with his poem, Reply of a Young Boy to pro-English verses.

At the age of 16 he joined the IRA and decided, apparently of his own volition, that it would be a good idea to bomb Liverpool docks. The result was his arrest in England for possession of explosives. His explanation to the court for the contents of the bag with which he was discovered was that the potassium chlorate found in his luggage was medication for his ears. He even claimed to have a doctor’s note to that effect. The Judge was not impressed. Pronouncing sentence he told Behan that, but for his youth, his prison sentence would have been much longer. He was committed to borstal for three years. Soberingly, on the day he was sent down two IRA volunteers, Peter Barnes and William McCormick, were hanged in Winston Green prison in Birmingham for their involvement in an explosion in Coventry in 1939 which had killed five people.

Behan’s sojourn in prison would become the inspiration for his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy.

On his return to Ireland Behan was jailed once again, sentenced to fourteen years for the attempted murder of two Irish detectives. He was released in a general amnesty in 1946. While he maintained a healthy disrespect for the forces of law and order, once observing that, ‘I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make worse’ his militant Republican activities had ended by his mid 20s.

His first major commercial and artistic success was his prison play The Quare Fellow. This started life in the Pike Theatre in Dublin before the famous English director Joan Littlewood took it to London. The play was an instant success and transferred to the West End.  Behan did the cause of the play no particular harm, whatever about his own reputation, when he appeared drunk on a BBC TV interview with the rather self-important Malcolm Muggeridge. Sceptics, unwilling to accept Behan’s credentials as a writer, claimed, unfairly, that it was really Littlewood who had crafted The Quare Fellow, prompting the gibe that ‘While Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, Brendan Behan wrote under Littlewood.’

Further success followed with The Hostage in 1958, an English language version of his play An Giall which was first produced in the Damer theatre on Stephen’s Green. Though some claim that the resemblance between the two is a passing one. The appearance of Borstal Boy the same year further enhanced his growing reputation.

Unfortunately, coinciding with this success, Behan was becoming almost as well known for his drinking as for his writing. He once described himself as a ‘drinker with writing problems’ and one bon mot ascribed to him on a visit to North America was the observation that ‘I saw a billboard saying ‘Drink Canada Dry – so I did’. Like another famous Celtic roisterer, the aforementioned Dylan Thomas, Behan would have a short life. He developed diabetes in his thirties and it hastened his death. He collapsed in a Dublin bar in 1964 and died in the Meath Hospital. He was only forty-one years old.

Brendan Behan, two days short of his 17^th birthday, was sentenced to 3 years in Borstal at Liverpool Assizes 74 years ago, on this day.

In the early 1950s the roll on roll off ferry was a new and exciting innovation. The M.V. Princess Victoria, a British Railways car ferry steamer, which travelled on a daily basis between Larne in Co.Antrim and Stranraer in Scotland was one of the earliest examples of this new breed of passenger ship. Built in Dumbarton in 1946 it was capable of accommodating up to 1,500 passengers and 40 cars. The ferry was the fourth ship to bear the name Princess Victoria. Ominously as it turned out, the previous version had been sunk in 1939 by a German mine.

On the morning of 31 January 1953 gale force winds battered Western Europe. Even on dry land the storms claimed over 500 lives. At 7.45 that morning the Princess Victoria, under the command of 55 year old Captain James Ferguson, set sail for Larne from Stranraer. The initial part of the voyage, in the shelter of Loch Ryan, may have lulled the captain and crew into believing that the trip would not be too hazardous to complete. However, when the Princess Victoria left the shelter of the Loch, with its 127 passengers and 49 crew, and encountered the ferocious open sea its problems began.

Ferguson decided to head back to the safety of Stranraer shortly before 9.00 am. His luck ran out, however, when a huge wave stove in the stern doors and the ferry began to ship water at an alarming rate. Ferguson changed course again, deciding that sailing to Larne was now the better option.

Two hours into the voyage The Princess Victoria sent its first request for help. There was no radio telephone on board the ship so this was sent via morse code by the undoubted hero of the tragedy about to unfold, radio officer David Broadfoot. He wasn’t even supposed to be on duty that day but had swapped shifts with another crew member.

By 10.30 the car deck was flooded and the ferry was listing dangerously. By 1.00 pm the starboard engine room was completely inundated and fifteen minutes later Broadfoot signalled that the order had been given to abandon ship. The only way that rescuers could get a fix on the stricken vessel was to take a bearing off the morse code signal. Knowing this Broadfoot stayed at his post and continued sending messages, even apologizing as he did so for the deteriorating quality of his signalling. Broadfoot was awarded the George Cross for his bravery, sadly the award was posthumous. Like Captain Ferguson he went down with the ship.

Some of the other heroes that day were on board the Donaghadee lifeboat, whose crew, under coxswain Sam Kelly, faced raging seas but still managed to rescue many of the 43 survivors. None of the women or children on board the ferry was saved. Many made it into one of the lifeboats but a huge wave dashed the craft against the sinking ferry and all on board were lost.

Among the passengers who drowned that day were the Northern Ireland Deputy Prime Minister Major J. M. Sinclair, and Sir Walter Smiles, the Ulster Unionist MP for North Down. Another unsung hero, Nansy Bryson, also perished, as she tried unsuccessfully to rescue a young child.

The tragedy was, at the time, the worst maritime disaster in UK waters since World War II.

The Princess Victoria sank, claiming the lives of 133 passengers and crew, sixty one years ago, on this day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAFHWMV9x0g – 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdmKEj8wVz0