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Thomas Power O'Connor 5 October 1848 – 18 November 1929 |
Thomas Power O'Connor was
born in Athlone in 1848, known as T. P. O'Connor and occasionally as Tay Pay
(mimicking his own pronunciation of the initials T. P.). He was a journalist or
the ‘Saunders' Newsletter’ in Dublin an Irish nationalist political figure, and
a member of parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland for nearly fifty years.
T P O'Connor was born in
Athlone, County Westmeath , on 5th October 1848. He was
the eldest son of Thomas O'Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa
Power, the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He
was educated at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and
Queen's College Galway, where he won scholarships in history and modern
languages and built up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the
college's Literary and Debating Society. He entered journalism as a junior
reporter on Saunders' Newsletter, a Dublin
journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moved to London ,
and was appointed a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph, principally on account
of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the
Franco-Prussian War. He later became London
correspondent for the New York Herald. In 1885, O'Connor married Elizabeth
Paschal, a daughter of a Judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.
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Scotland Road 1860 |
T P O'Connor was elected
Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 general election, as a
representative of Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule League. At the next
general election in 1885, he was returned both for Galway and for the Liverpool
Scotland constituencies, (Scotland
Road ) which had a large Irish population.; he chose
to sit for Liverpool . By the second half of
the 19th Century the Vauxhall/Scotland
Road area was one of overcrowding, with streets
filled with thick smoke and foul vapours, houses and courts squeezed in amongst
industrial premises. The corporation had been demolishing unsanitary property
since the 1860s and as an exemplary provision of working class housing had
built St Martin's Cottages in 1869, the first council houses in England . T P
O’Connor would represent this area and remain as the only Irish Nationalist MP
in Great Britain .
He retained his seat long after Ireland
secured independence in 1921. His seat only became vacant on his death in 1929,
when it was taken up by David Logan. Logan
was heavily involved in the Irish Nationalist movement, and had represented the
party on Liverpool City Council. By the time of his 1929 election he, however,
joined the Labour Party and therefore left his mentor O’Connor his position in
the history books as the only Irish Nationalist MP in Britain . The Liverpool Scotland Borough
constituency existed between 1885–1974 and was replaced by the Liverpool
Scotland Exchange ward.
From 1905 he belonged to
the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in
parliament, he wrote a nightly sketch of proceedings there for the Pall Mall
Gazette. He became "Father of the House of Commons", with unbroken
service of 49 years 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceased to exist
effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter O'Connor
effectively sat as an independent.
"T P O'Connor Bust" © P Ingerson |
The Bust of journalist and politician T. P.
O'Connor in Fleet Street ,
London .
The inscription reads,
"His pen could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in
a few vivid lines."
In 1887 O Connor founded
and edited the radical newspaper, The Star. He was appointed the first
President of the Board of Film Censors in 1917, and was appointed to the Privy
Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He was also a Fellow of the
Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world's oldest journalists'
organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O'Connor charity
fund.
O'Connor authored a range
of books, including Lord Beaconsfield – A Biography (1879); The Parnell
Movement (1886); Gladstone 's
House of Commons; Napoleon; The Phantom Millions; and Memoirs of an Old
Parliamentarian (1929). He died in London on 18
November 1929 and is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery
in north-west London .
Sources
Liverpool Central Library
Bain News Service,
U S Library of Congress's Prints and
Photographs
T P O'Connor
Bust" by P Ingerson, Creative Commons