8 years after first exploring the Gate Lodge, and promising information about a famous resident, I'll return to Marlay Grange, and present selected entries from the 1911 census for the townland of Haroldsgrange:

• St Enda's, Pearse household
• St Enda's school
• Marlay Grange house
• The gate lodge [original image]

In the latter we find Thomas MacDonagh, whose potted history follows:

from Tipperary and was born in 1878. He was a teacher and later taught at St. Enda’s School; the school he helped to found with Patrick Pearse. He was appointed director of training for the Irish Volunteers in 1914 and later joined the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood). Thomas MacDonagh was appointed to the IRB military committee in 1916. He was commander of the Second Battalion of Volunteers that occupied Jacob’s biscuit factory and surrounding houses during the 1916 Rising. He was executed on the 3th of May 1916.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography gives us a little more detail on the period of his life before 1916:

During his second year at St Enda's, MacDonagh read English, French and Irish at UCD, graduating BA (1910). Shaken by an unhappy love affair with writer and teacher Mary Maguire (Mary Colum), he resigned from St Enda's at the time of the school's move to Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin.
After a restorative six weeks in Paris, he assumed a semi-reclusive residence in the lodge of Grange House, Rathfarnham (whose owner, Professor David Houston [appears in its 1911 census] of the College of Science, became an intimate friend), engaged in writing, post-graduate research and part-time teaching at St Enda's (1910-12).

In the original introduction to a book of his poetry, MacDonagh mentioned the gate lodge, and also wrote a poem "Grange House Lodge"

The making and re-making of these poems, my new work and my old, began in 1911, during the year that I lived in Grange House Lodge, Rathfarnham, the tenant and neighbour of my friend, David Houston.

The later introduction to The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh, published after his execution, is more lyrical:

At that time he lived a kind of semi-detached life at the gate-lodge of Mr. Houston's house in the Dublin hills. To this house all literary Dublin used to repair, and there MacDonagh was constantly to be seen. He was a quaint recluse who delighted in company, and he fled into and  out of solitude with equal precipitancy. He had a longing for the hermit's existence and a gift for gregarious life. At Grange House both these aptitudes were met, and I think he was very content there. Out on the hills, walking across the fields, or along the narrow roads curving to this side and that, but always running upwards, he would repeat his verses to me, and accompany them and follow them with a commentary that seemed endless as the bushes that lined our road.

On a lovely trip to Nice yesterday, I saw a monument to a mayor of the city from 1928 - 1943 and 1947 - 1965,

Jean Medécin,

who had a son who was also mayor for a long time,

Jacques Medécin

who, unlike his father, was fond of

Gaullism,

the French political ideology which espouses national independence, including the

Force de frappe,

the tactical and strategic framework for

France's weapons of mass destruction,

which were mostly tested in her colonies and had some costly accidents including the

Beryl incident,

when some soldiers and officials were exposed to radiation, including another Gaullist,

Gaston Paleweski,

long-time lover of English novelist Nancy Mitford, one of the

Mitford sisters,

another of whom married

Oswald Mosley

a notable British proponent of

fascism.

The following has been re-posted from the old johnl.org:

This is a comic shown to me by friend Meron. It was originally in Russian by Alexey Lipatov, but an anonymous individual translated it the dialogue into English. It was re-formatted by Thomas Silbey. I went one step further and re-lettered the comic in English, in 2005.

I re-lettered all the dialogue and narrations. I re-lettered most of the special effects, necessitating some re-drawing of the backgrounds. Some special effects I left because they made sense as they were or because they would have been hard to replicate. I took some slight liberties with the text. I know Stalin sounds a bit like Seán Connery, and I like it! Imagine the Scot playing Stalin in the biopic...

If any of the aforementioned people object to this re-lettered comic, please contact me.

You'll have to click Read More to see the comic!

(more...)