George Gavan Duffy

• Author: Colum Gavan Duffy
• Pages: 1-29

GEORGE GAVAN DUFFY

COLUM GAVAN DUFFY*

I. PART I

George Gavan Duffy was the eldest son of the third

marriage of Charles Gavan Duffy. Charles married Louise

Hall, who was a niece of his second deceased wife, Susan

Hughes, in 1880, after he had finally returned to Europe from

Australia.

George was born in his maternal grandfather's house,

Rose Cottage, Rockferry, Cheshire, one hundred years ago, on

the 21st October 1882, just a week after Éamon de Valera.

Subsequently, Louise Hall had three more children - Louise,

who later opened Scoil Bhríghde, her Irish speaking school, in

Dublin; Bryan who, as a Jesuit of the English province,

ministered for many years in South Africa; and Tom, who

joined the French Society of Foreign Missions and founded

the first large training school for catechises in Southern India.

George’s mother died in 1888, when George was six

years old. In 1888, my grandfather, Charles, was seventy-two

years of age. He entrusted the education of these young

children to his three unmarried daughters of the second

marriage, Susan, Harriet and Geraldine, who had come from

Australia to Nice in France to care for him. Charles felt that

the damp Irish climate would not suit him, though he visited

Ireland every summer.

It was during the next few years that Charles was to

produce his historical works, Young Ireland,Four Years of

Irish History,The League of North and South and My Life in

Two Hemispheres. His home in Nice was a meeting place for

1Judicial Studies Institute Journal [2:2

* Reprinted from the Dublin Historical Record Volume XXXVI Issue 3

(June 1983) by kind permission of the publishers, the Old Dublin Society

and with the kind permission of Ms. Máire Gavan Duffy. A short

biographical note on Mr. Colum Gavan Duffy follows this article.

the Irish literati of the time - John Dillon, Douglas Hyde and

many others. At the same time, Charles was a Victorian father

who did not associate readily with his young children.

George was first sent to the Petit Seminaire in Nice

and became fluent in French. At the age of thirteen, he went to

the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst in Lancashire in 1895, and

for the next seven years was normally first in his class and

carried off several prizes, having attended the post-secondary

School of Philosophy. His brothers Bryan and Tom

subsequently joined him in Stonyhurst. The correspondence

with his half sisters shows them to have been imbued with

Victorian ideas of propriety. My grandfather, Charles, died in

Nice in March 1903.

In 1902, George became articled to a solicitor's firm

and, having passed all the law examinations magna cum

laude, was admitted a solicitor in England in 1907. One of his

tutors was Edward Jenks, whose Digest of English Civil Law

was a legal masterpiece. At this time, he met Margaret

Sullivan, daughter of A.M. Sullivan, who had succeeded

Charles as editor of The Nation when he went to Australia in

1855, and they were subsequently married, in Irish, in

Commercial Road Church, East London, on 20th December

1908. My mother, Margaret, had been secretary of the Irish

Literary Society founded by Charles in London in 1896.

As my grandfather, Charles, had not manifested much

interest in the Irish language, it is surprising that George took

a great (if not passionate) interest in it all his life and acquired

a good knowledge of it. In 1910 he spent his holiday on the

island of Inish Maan in Aran, and eventually leased an old

Coast Guard Station on the shores of Lough Swilly, at

Glenvar, in Co. Donegal. This was where my sister and I

learnt Irish as infants. He had been a member of the Irish Club

in 1906, and frequently travelled over Ireland and Britain to

attend Sinn Féin Executive meetings. From 1910, he tended to

become more radical and was not content with the resolutions

of the Executive.

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