The most authentic voice raised at that meeting may well have been that of Mr Edward G. Walker, black lawyer and orator, President of Tufts College. ‘With his pen John Boyle O’Reilly sent through the columns of a newspaper that he edited in this city, words in our behalf that were Christian, and anathemas that were just.’ He had taken up the slack, said Walker, after the death of the great Wendell Phillips.
A Pontifical requiem mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Boston at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on 10 September 1890. At a memorial service in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the speakers included Meagher’s friends Generals Hancock and Howard, the governor of the state, a number of serving and former Senators, and the president of Columbia University. A letter of condolence from President Harrison was read.
A Boston committee endowed an Alcove of Celtic Literature in his honour in the Boston Public Library. A commissioned bust was placed in the library. A fine monument engraved with two harps and displaying his features as Bostonians knew them, also stands on the Fenway. His remains were to be exhumed from Calvary Cemetery, Roxbury, in November, and then moved to what his supporters considered a more august grave in Holywood cemetery in Brookline. Marked by a huge glacial rock, the grave was simply inscribed.
O’Reilly was by death at least saved the odious side-taking which took place when Parnell was cited as co-respondent in a divorce suit Captain O’Shea filed against his wife Katherine, a woman thereafter doomed to proceed into history under the soubriquet ‘Kitty.’
As we have already seen, many of his less frenetic fellow prisoners in British prisons and passengers on Hougoumont lived considerably longer. The more obscure, competent, honourable, temperamentally positive Denis Cashman, who had tempered O’Reilly’s rashness on Hougoumont, would survive him by twelve years, and at his death was still employed by the Pilot.
John Kenealy, former Western Australian prisoner now of Los Angeles, had made a place for himself in California as spacious as but less lustrous than that achieved by O’Reilly in Boston. Devoy remembered much later that Kenealy had ‘moved to Los Angeles before it became famous, except as a health resort.’ The rail link assured that the tuberculosis sufferers of the east and midwest teemed to Pasadena and Los Angeles in tens of thousands to be cured by the pure, dry, warm air, and old Fenian dry goods men benefited accordingly.
The People’s Store of Dillon and Kenealy, 86 Main Street, ‘opposite the Temple Block,’ on what is now the corner of Market Street, bespoke Kenealy’s respect for enterprise and property. The company was a regular advertiser in the Los Angeles Daily Star and later in the Los Angeles Times, particularly throughout spring and autumn. The Los Angeles Daily Star of 14 March 1878, for example, asserted: ‘This space is reserved for Dillon and Kenealy, who are in receipt of a LARGE consignment of Foreign and Domestic Dry Goods.’ There followed a long list of the goods Mr Kenealy had shipped back from his annual buying trips: black and coloured silks, shawls, dress goods, figured and plain piques, printed linen, lawns, ladies and children’s hosiery, 20,000 yards of beautiful embroideries.
Kenealy and his wife May Dillon had two children, James F. Kenealy, who became a noted Los Angeles attorney, and May Kenealy. He resided from 1875 in a cottage on the east side of Fort and Second Street, Fort later becoming Broadway. Nearby was the music school of Mary E. Hoyt, the town’s best-known music teacher, from whose house could be heard children working their way through Listen to the Mocking Bird and The Rippling Brook. Los Angeles looked for all the world like a little town in Australia, and not at all unlike a slightly inland Fremantle minus the gaol. Boyle Workman, memoirist of Los Angeles and son of one of the oldest Californian Irish families, had been a schoolboy with Kenealy’s son James at St Vincent’s College on Sixth Street between Fort and Hill. ‘There was no Seventh Street in those days … Our baseball field was on the Fort Street side.’
‘Every year,’ wrote Boyle Workman, ‘Kenealy went to Ireland to buy the finest laces and linens.’ Obviously the Los Angeles Irish attached their own mythology to these buying trips. ‘Had the British government known his political background, it might have halted these buying trips.’ And perhaps there was a political component to Kenealy’s travel, as there had been when he was a buyer for the Queen’s Old Castle. For after Catalpa, Kenealy remained an activist of the Clan. In 1882 a British agent sent to the Foreign Office a circular from the Clan na Gael Council which showed that John Kenealy of Los Angeles, California, was one of the council members elected in Chicago on 3 August 1881. This was only a little prior to the period when Chicago would be rendered unacceptable for moderate Clan members such as Kenealy by the emergence of the Chicago Triangle.
From companies of the stature of the People’s Store came much of the resources of Clan and monetary support for the Land League. Indeed, on his journeys to Ireland to buy linen Kenealy would have witnessed defiance towards landlords in his native North Cork. In the mid-1880s, the tenants of Arthur Langford’s estate, twenty-five families, were on rent strike. Appearing before the court of land judges in November 1888 in order to oppose the demand made by some of his tenants for a rent remission 30 per cent, Langford complained bitterly that he was ‘reduced to such a picture of poverty’ by these people boycotting and rent striking that he could not afford counsel.
Kenealy’s business flourished as the town enlarged and assumed a civic pride. On 29 August 1888, in the Los Angeles Herald, along with the announcement of the National Democratic ticket for President of Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania and William A. Tinglish of Indiana for Vice President, another typical Dillon and Kenealy summer advertisement indicated the People’s Store was doing massive business. ‘Compulsory sale of dry goods at Dillon and Kenealy’s in order to make way for immense quantities of goods purchased by Mr Kenealy in the European and Eastern markets. Stock has to be reduced by at least $40,000.’ These advertisements, proud of newly purchased merchandise, a little boastful of their enormous surplus stock, continued to appear under the masthead of the Herald each day for a month.
Later, Kenealy branched out. He had shares in the Los Angeles Cable Railway Company, a business which failed, but then went into partnership with young Boyle Workman in the fire insurance business, an interesting vocation for a man who, at his trial, had been accused of desiring to put Cork to the torch. ‘Our offices,’ Workman remembered decades later, ‘were at 207 South Broadway in the YMCA building.’ W. H. Workman, Boyle’s father, who had been Democratic mayor of Los Angeles a number of times, in 1903 was elected City Treasurer. Irish Democrat politics in the City of Angels took its style from the party machines of the East, at least according to a disgruntled Republican, Stinson, who later complained, ‘At that time, 1903, the political machine controlled all of the political offices from Governor to Constables.’ False names were placed on the voting registers, men were fraudulently registered as living on vacant blocks, in Japanese lodging houses and so on. Stinson organised young Republicans to go to polling booths and supervise the crossing off of the electoral roll and the signatures of electors.
John Kenealy appeared in the Los Angeles Auditor’s Report of 1903 as the appointed city treasury clerk under Workman’s fairly or foully elected incumbency as Treasurer. The photograph in the report resembles Kenealy’s mug shot as a Fenian. Broad in the forehead, benign, he was bearded and was still—as a witness had said at his trial—stout. Kenealy’s son, James F. Kenealy, was by that time caught up in the city’s larger drama: not Ireland, but water. He worked as a lawyer for the Board of Arbitration established to judge the crucial southern Californian matter of water ownership between the city and the Crystal Spring Water Company. No doubt the attention even of aging Irish activists was—in a desert coast town—sometimes galvanised by the question of water, a case which the city won in the end in the Supreme Court.
Before Fenian John Kenealy was of advanced age, notices for the Elmore, the Packard, which cost $3,500, and the Pierce Straight Arrow Six, costing a cons
iderable $4,000, appeared side by side with dry-goods advertisements in the Sunday editions of the Los Angeles Times. Middle-aged Fenians’ grandchildren read the new comic strips—Little Memo in Slumberland, Waggles in Wonderland and Buster Brown. One Colonel Selig had in 1908 rented a boomtime mansion at Eighth and Old Streets and shot the first motion picture for exhibition purposes in Los Angeles. It was entitled In the Sultan’s Power. But though the world had altered, Irish faction and sect had not, and Home Rule had still not been achieved. Without seeing it, far less an Irish Republic, Kenealy died on 9 September 1908 at the age of seventy-one, at his then residence, 1121 West Ninth Street. The next day the Los Angeles Times, serving a city which had increased tenfold since the Fenian first arrived, carried on its front page the headline Revolutionist Irish Leader has Passed On. Kenealy’s picture appeared side by side with that of the winner of the first Los Angeles marathon, a red-headed boy named Edward Dietrich. The report said Kenealy had been confined to his house for many months. His Fenian remains had the honour of a high mass at the Cathedral.
In the parallel universe of Australia, the aging and poetry-fated couple Saint Kevin and Eva now suffered a hecatomb of their children. Their son Vincent, a manager of the National Bank, left a wife and small son when in 1890 he was run down at night, while crossing George Street, Brisbane, by a horse-drawn public carriage. In 1892, Dr Edward O’Doherty’s four-year-old daughter died. William, their first son, perished after a long illness the next year. Still there was young Kevin, and the energetic Dr Edward, who had fought his way back from bankruptcy and was a physician at Brisbane Hospital. But both would die within a few months of each other in 1900, at the end of that unfulfilled century. Far from home, on the sun-blasted gold-field of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, young Kevin was taken by pneumonia at the height of a desert summer. Then, during winter, Dr Edward O’Doherty fell entering a coach outside his house in Wickham Terrace, Brisbane, and died before night of a brain haemorrhage. Saint Kevin and Eva had begotten eight children, and now only their youngest, Gertrude, remained.
Kevin and Eva waited out that fatal decade in a superior boarding house in Wickham Terrace, Brisbane. Undefeated, Dr O’Doherty devoted himself to research on a safe defrosting and preservation method for previously frozen meat, which was brought to the attention of Queensland legislators in 1897. ‘The process is the conception of Dr K. I. O’Doherty and Mr Henderson, a government analyst. On Wednesday, a brisket of corn beef treated by it was boiled by Mr Baldwin and submitted to the opinion of the legislators.’ Though a patent for the process was applied for, it did not restore the O’Doherty fortunes.
About the turn of the century, Kevin and Eva moved to a suburb named Rosalie, to a characteristic little Queensland, wide-verandah’d wood-frame house on stilts. Eva’s intelligence and courage still blazed under the banality of that ceiling. She did not publicly reflect on how much more plebeian than Killeen House in Portumna, or even than Frascati, this plain cottage was. Soon, complete blindness descended on Kevin and prevented him from carrying out his duties. He was irked and bored, but three young colleagues who held the aging doctor in esteem performed his work and gave him the fees.
He died in July 1905 at eighty-one years, and was buried in suburban Toowong cemetery. His place of death was nominated as ‘His residence, Westholme, Heussler Terrace,’ a Queensland cottage floridly named. The Brisbane Courier now asked, ‘Who knowing such men as Doctor O’Doherty can link them with the darker crimes of great agitations?’ One observer would call him, ‘the genial medico, Kevin Izod O’Doherty’ and said that ‘no man was better known in his day.’ Such genial appraisals came too late to do Saint Kevin any good.
Eva survived another five years in hard circumstances. Her only surviving child, Gertrude, lived with her, and Gertrude’s wages as a state government typist, and a small insurance policy on Kevin’s life, were her mainstay. Mother and daughter, the residue of furious hopes and hearty clans, moved to a modest cottage near Toowong. Eva was a forthright woman and was offended that the Redmond brothers had not sent her condolences for the loss of a man who had twice sacrificed all for Ireland, and all the more offended since William Redmond was in Queensland at the time. But a literary priest from Settle, Yorkshire, Father William Hickey, who had a passionate interest in the Young Irelanders, communicated with her, asked her for any Young Ireland memorabilia she might care to send him, and hearing of her circumstances, suggested a new edition of her works. To him she wrote of her late husband that when he went to join Parnell, ‘It was a very losing game for a professional man, but the doctor was not one to count the cost.’
Father Hickey undertook to look after the cost of printing her works. There were editorial delays in 1908 as he asked for more material, including her prose pieces. In August 1908 he wrote of raising a subscription to the publication, and also of a fund-raising concert which would be held in Dublin in October to meet the expenses. He told her that friends to whose judgement he paid attention strongly urged him not to publish every poem, but to select them. This, he felt, ‘would be better for your great reputation as the worthy soror poetica of Mary and Speranza.’ In September 1908, the Irish publishers Gill accepted the collected works for publication, and offered to pay the author on the day of publication the sum of £20 and a royalty of 10 per cent. This meant that the £140 Hickey had raised for printing costs could now be sent to maintain Eva.
The poems appeared in December, and in congratulating her at her re-emergence, Eva of the Nation redivivus, Father Hickey urged her to write pen sketches of the ultimately knighted Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, of Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, John Martin, Father Kenyon, and the Nation poets Mary and Speranza. The aging rebel Eva sat down in her little cottage in Toowong and made vivid and sometimes acerbic notes absolutely in character with the brisk poetry she had written as Ireland’s virgin muse. Her notes indicate again that Eva had not moved from her opinions in 1848. ‘The rising misnamed—no rising. No plans or order—no leader. The hour had come in all probability, but not the man. Certainly there was one man who had been suffered to be seized as a felon—John Mitchel—who held practical views.’ She defended Father Kenyon, who, she wrote, had always said that the time for striking the blow came when Mitchel was brought as a convicted felon through the streets of Dublin. She had believed that sixty years before, and now, in the humidity of Brisbane, in the walls of timber, she still believed it. ‘The people were then ready—or filled with rage and enthusiasm. They were held back by their leaders.’
She denied that it was Speranza who stood up in court at Duffy’s trial and tried to proclaim herself the writer of those treasonable articles, Alea Jacta Est and The Tocsin of Ireland. In fact she implied cowardice on the part of Speranza and others in not taking responsibility for the seditious material they had written. The heroine who did own up in the public gallery in Green Street courthouse was Mrs Callan, Duffy’s sister-in-law, later a resident of Melbourne.
Not that Eva showed much tolerance for Duffy, who had died in retirement in France in 1903. In tune with Mitchel, she felt that Duffy had dishonoured himself by calling on too many character witnesses. ‘When first I met Sir C. G. Duffy, he seemed to me full of an abounding vitality, something wild and eerie in speech and laughter.’ She described him a little snobbishly as possessing ‘a Dublin-like physiognomy.’ Then, ‘In later years, as he passed through the mill of modern social conventionalism, his physiognomy was in marked contrast … it had been moulded into the expression of a man of society and letters.’ She disclosed that whenever she wrote an item for the Nation on the subject of Smith O’Brien’s treatment in exile, Charles Gavin Duffy received an angry protest from Lucy O’Brien, denying the truth of the inflammatory reports of her husband’s poor health.
Under a mocking Queensland sun, she took pride in her descent from the O’Flahertys and the O’Kellys of Hy Many, Hugh Larkin’s country, and as the last of all the actors of Young Ireland, she revived the part
icularity of all the others in that little house in the bush-bound suburbs of a raw city, and their ghosts glittered, postured and revived her.
Hickey wrote of her collected works, ‘All the reviews of your book that I have seen since its publications give instinctive praise to your verses; so you have, I think, left to the reading world of your countrymen a work that will last many a day and year.’ But Eva was not immune in her last years from the normal publication blues. She complained that the book had not been adequately advertised in Australia. Though it might not have been much literary consolation, Eva received about £400 from special events held throughout the Irish communities in various states, including an ‘Eva of the Nation’ fund in Queensland.
Her memoirs unfinished, she died of complications from influenza at eighty years of age on 21 May 1910. Saint Kevin and Eva of the Nation lie in Toowong Cemetery under a handsome monument built by the Irish community.
Physician and Muse, man and wife!
They came from Ireland’s shores.
Through adversity their light shone brightly,
Inspiring all on whom it shone.
The O’Doherty male line did not survive. The only grandson of Saint Kevin and Eva, Willy O’Doherty, son of the tragic Vincent, was killed in France in 1918 fighting with the Australian forces, struggling for a different cause than his grandparents, another set of myths; antipodean ones.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 87