Finding the other Lady Fitzgerald who had family roots in Lichfield, who was married three times, and whose life was marked by tragedy

Dam Street, Lichfield, where Lady Fitzgerald’s grandfather Christopher Heveningham was a mercer and draper (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was recalling last night (15 May 2026) the social scandal that became a point of gossip in Staffordshire in the mid-18th century when Sir William Wolseley took his supposed second wife Anne Whitby to court in Lichfield seeking a divorce or annulment. The case involved allegations and accusations of greed, manipulation, cheating, forgery, desertion, perjury, bigamy, adultery, bribery, drugged drinks and corrupt and dishonest clergy.

Quite separately, I wrote some time ago (4 June 2020) about Sir James Fitzgerald who lived decades later at Wolseley Hall and in Lichfield and who managed to convincingly persuade people far and wide – and even Burke’s Peerage – that he was the rightful holder of an Irish title of baronet given to a different branch of the Fitzgerald family in Co Limerick.

Fitzgerald’s wife, Augusta Henrietta Fremantle (1803-1863), was known in polite circles as Lady Fitzgerald. They married in 1826 and lived for some years at Maple Hayes Hall near Pipe Hall and Lichfield. When he died in France in 1839, he was described as living at Wolseley Hall, but his widow continued to live at Maple Hayes and in 1841 she was attending Holy Cross Church, Lichfield. She later moved to Castle Ishen, Co Cork, where she died in 1863.

But there was another Lady Fitzgerald, the wife of a real Irish baronet, who also lived in Lichfield in the 19th century, and who had strong connections with Lichfield through her immediate ancestors, her mother and grandparents, her cousins and her grandchildren, and who was a direct descendant of the Comberford family of Comberford Hall.

Margaret (Warner) Fitzgerald was a direct descendant of Margaret Comberford and William Stanley who lived at Comberford Hall 250 years before she was born (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Margaret Warner (1806-1883), who eventually became the other Lady Fitzgerald in Lichfield, was a cousin of a number of prominent clergy in Victorian Lichfield, she was married three times, and the family of her third husband is still remembered in Ireland for the tragedies that befell successive generations, decade after decade, until the family line died out in 1917. Her life is a sad tale that includes drownings, suicide, a child’s death at play, crushing family debts, being widowed three times and her final days lived out in genteel poverty with fading memories of life among minor aristocracy.

This Lady Fitzgerald was born Margaret Warner in 1806, the daughter of Elizabeth Heveningham (1774-1823) from Lichfield and William Warner (1762-1835). They were married in Saint Philip’s Church, Birmingham, now Birmingham Cathedral.

Her mother Elizabeth Heveningham was born in Lichfield on 18 August 1774, the daughter of Charles Heveningham (1737-1782), a mercer and draper of Dam Street, Lichfield. He may have spent part of his childhood at Pipe Hall, the Heveningham ancestral home near Lichfield, and he was a direct descendant of Charles Heveningham (1540-1574) of Pipe Hall and his wife Dorothy Stanley (1530-1587), only daughter of William Stanley of Comberford Hall and Margaret Comberford (1494-1568). I have written last year (23 July 2025) about the Heveningham family and their links with the Comberford family.

Saint Mary’s Church, Lichfield, at night … many members of the Heveningham family were baptised and buried from there (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Charles Heveningham’s first cousin Mary married the Revd Daniel William Remington, Vicar of Saint Michael’s (1757-1772) and of Saint Mary’s (1772-1789), Lichfield, and sub-chanter of Lichfield Cathedral; Elizabeth (Heveningham) Warner was a second cousin of two successive Vicars of Saint Mary’s, the Revd William Remington, who founded the first Sunday school in Lichfield, and the Revd Edward Remington; another second cousin Mary Remington married Thomas White, Procurator of the Ecclesiastical Court in Lichfield and a cousin of the poet Anna Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’.

Elizabeth’s daughter Margaret Warner was married three times, and she was 47 and twice widowed when, on 27 April 1854, she married her third husband, Sir John Judkin-Fitzgerald (1787-1860), an Irish baronet, as his third wife.

Margaret was only 20 – perhaps even younger – when she married her first husband, Robert Jones Parry of Aston-juxta-Birmingham and Hendre, Flintshire. They were the parents of three children, a daughter and two sons:

1, Margaret Parry (1827-1894), who married the Revd Evan Pughe (1807-1869); her son-in-law, Major Philip Halliley Carter (1866-1949) of Birmingham, continued the research into the history of the Heveningham family. Some of her descendants returned to live in the Lichfield area.
2, Robert Jones Parry, who died an infant.
3, (the Revd) William Warner Parry, (born 1832), a naval chaplain whose research into the Heveningham family tree is also an important source.

Margaret Warrners’s second husband was Samuel Banks of Rugeley, but he died soon after their marriage.

The Town Hall in Cashel, Co Tipperary … Margaret Warner’s husband, Sir John Judkin-Fitzgerald, was Mayor of Cashel and High Sheriff of Co Tipperary (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Margaret was twice widowed and was 47 when she married the widowed 67-year-old Irish baronet, Sir John Judkin-Fitzgerald (1787-1860). He was her third husband and she was his third wife. He was the son of Sir Thomas Judkin-FitzGerald (1754-1810) of Cashel, Co Tipperary, who was given the title of baronet in 1801 as a reward for his role in suppressing the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 in Co Tipperary, his support for the Act of Union, and for his time as High Sheriff of Tipperary (1798-1803).

During the 1798 Rising, he became known as ‘Flogging Fitzgerald’, When he died in 1810, an obituary’ referred to his excessive use of the cat o’ nine tails as a magistrate, saying: ‘The history of his life and loyalty is written in legible characters on the backs of his fellow countrymen.’

Margaret’s husband, Sir John Judkin-Fitzgerald, was born on 27 August 1787. He was 23 when he succeeded to his father’s estates in Cashel and his title as the second baronet in 1810. He lived in Golden, near Cashel, and was the Mayor of Cashel and High Sheriff of Co Tipperary (1819-1820).

Sir John married his first wife, the widowed Elizabeth Moore (née Pennefather), in Cashel Cathedral in 1816. They were the parents of one child, Margaret’s future husband, Sir Thomas Judkin-Fitzgerald (1820-1864). Elizabeth died on 26 April 1835, and Sir John married his second wife, Geraldine Fitzgerald, on 10 November 1837. They were the parents of one child, Geraldine Caroline (1839-1916), and this second Lady Fitzgerald died in childbirth on 11 February 1839.

By the time Margaret Warner married Sir John married on 27 April 1854, he was selling off large tracts of land in furtive attempts to clear his mounting debts. The land he sold between 1852 and 1856 included over 3,800 acres in Co Wexford, Co Waterford, Co Tipperary and Co Cork, and he sold another 1,500 acres in Co Cork in 1857. He was living at Golden Hills, near Golden and Cashel, when that too was advertised for sale in 1858, though it remained unsold.

Less than six years after he married Margaret, and now heavily indebted, Sir John was drowned on 28 February 1860. He was onboard the PS Nimrod, an Irish paddle steamer plying between Cork and Liverpool, when it ran aground at St David’s Head in Wales, smashed into three pieces and sank with the loss of 45 lives, 25 crew and 20 passengers. He was 72, Margaret was 52 and now a widow for the third time.

Sir John’s title, his remaining lands and his crushing debts were inherited by his only son, Margaret’s stepson, Sir Thomas Judkin-FitzGerald (1820-1864), as the third baronet. He was a magistrate and a Deputy Lieutenant for Co Tipperary, and continued to live at Golden Hills, which had not yet been sold off.

Three years before succeeding his father, Sir Thomas’s eldest son and heir, nine-year-old John Judkin Judkin-FitzGerald, died in another family tragedy in 1857 when he accidentally hanged himself in the garden. Two stories try to explain what happened: one account says it was an accident while the boy was playing on a swing; the other version says he was showing his younger siblings how their great-grandfather hanged rebels in 1798 when he slipped and accidentally hanged himself.

Sir Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald drowned himself in the River Suir at Golden on the night of 26/27 April 1864 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

But the family tragedies do not end there. Margaret’s stepson, the boy’s father, Sir Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, drowned himself in the River Suir at Golden on the night of 26/27 April 1864 when he was only 43.

A letter in the Clonmel Chronicle said reports that he was living in ‘greatly embarrassed circumstances’ and ‘greatly in debt’ were ‘much exaggerated’. But he was living with financial difficulties, finding he was liable for the debts of his father, Sir John Judkin Fitzgerald, totalling £7,000, or about £1.1 million today. Sir Thomas had insured his life for several thousand pounds so his family might not suffer from ever-mounting debts.

The jury reached a verdict of death as a result of temporary insanity. But local people tried to stop him being buried in consecrated ground in Ballygriffin churchyard because of his suicide. On the day of his funeral they packed the graveyard in Ballygriffin, filled the fresh-dug grave with stones, and blocked the priest from continuing with the burial. When he was buried eventually, his funeral was guarded by a large police presence.

By then, his step-mother, Margaret (Warner) Fitzgerald, now a widow for the third time, had moved to Moss Side, Manchester, with her son William Warner Parry and her step-daughter Geraldine Fitzgerald. Geraldine married Dr Walter Bourne in 1870 and they lived in Calcutta and later in Bradford. The Revd William Warner Parry, studied at Oxford, became a naval chaplain, and his research into the Heveningham family tree has been an important source.

Margaret died in genteel poverty in Southsea on 8 September 1883 at the age of 77. By then, her step-grandson, Sir Joseph Capel Judkin-FitzGerald (1853-1917), had succeeded to the Fitzgerald title as the fourth baronet as an eight-year-old in 1864. Golden Hills was advertised for sale again in 1878, when it was described as a ‘large castellated building’ with a drawing room opening into a conservatory, dining room and morning room, eight bedrooms and a servants’ hall. Most of the house had disappeared by the early 1940s, or was incorporated into a modern farmyard.

Sir Joseph Capel Judkin-Fitzgerald was the last and final baronet in his family. He lived a sad and dissolute life in England, accused of stealing jewellery, defrauding gullible divorcees, defaulting on loans and debts, leaving unpaid hotel and restaurant bills in London and Paris, and working as an unlicensed cab driver. He was threatened with imprisonment and was eventually declared bankrupt. He outlived his two sons, and when he died in 1917 his family title of baronet died out.

Saint Michael’s Church, Greenhill, Lichfield … many members of the Heveningham family are buried in the churchyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Meanwhile, some of Margaret Warner’s descendants through her first marriage to Robert Jones Parry would return to live in Lichfield and some of them had interesting roles in Church and academic life.

In 1847, her daughter Margaret Parry (1827-1894) married the Revd Evan Pughe (1807-1869), Vicar of Bangor, and later Rector of Llantrisant. Their large family included: Margaret Constance Pughe (1862-1930), whose family returned to live in Lichfield; and Alice Gertrude Pughe (1869-1892), whose husband Major Philip Halliley Carter (1866-1949) of Birmingham, continued the research into the Heveningham family history.

Margaret Constance Pughe (1862-1930) married the Very Revd Charles Walter Carrington (1859-1941) in Cambridge in 1890. He became the mission chaplain to the Bishop of Lichfield, and some of their children were born in Lichfield before the family moved to West Bromwich and then to New Zealand, where he was the Dean of Christchurch.

Margaret and Charles Carrington were the parents of a large family, including Philip Carrington (1892-1975), who was born in Lichfield and became Bishop of Quebec (1935-1960) and Metropolitan of Canada (1944-1960). Another son, the historian Charles Edmund Carrington (1897-1990), was Professor of History at Cambridge and the biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Graham Greene.

According to Margaret’s great-grandson, CE Carrington, writing in 1966, Lady Fitzgerald had ‘brought up her family to believe that they were the last survivors of one of the most ancient families in England, the Heveninghams of Heveningham, from whom she had inherited some old documents and a great deal of family pride.’

The two women known as Lady Fitzgerald had strong family links with Lichfield in the 19th century and both married Irish baronets. I sometimes wonder whether their paths ever crossed either in Lichfield or in Ireland, whether they knew each other, and whether they were ever confused with one another.

Most of the remains of the Fitzgerald estate in Golden, near Cashel, Co Tipperary, have had disappeared by the early 1940s and are difficult to find (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Sources and references include:

The Visitations of Staffordshire and Warwickshire.
Michael Greenslade, Catholic Staffordshire 1500-1850 (Gracewing, 2006).

The Heveningham family tree on Geni (last accessed 21 July 2025).
‘The Heveningham Family of Staffordshire’ (last accessed 21 July 2025).
The St. Leger-May Family Home Page (last accessed 15 May 2026).
‘Townships: Wall with Pipehill’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, ed MW Greenslade (London, 1990), pp 283-294. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp283-294 (last accessed 21 July 2025).
‘Burntwood: Manors, local government and public services’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, ed MW Greenslade (London, 1990), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp205-220 (last accessed 21 July 2025).
Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, ‘Notes on Dr Johnson’s Ancestors and Connexions’, pp 1-41 (London: 1909).

Childhood memories of waiting for Tomorrow with Petticoat Loose by the shores of Bay Lough

Bay Lough, the ‘bottomless’ lake near the Vee in the Knockmealdown Mountains … ‘Petticoat Loose’ and the monsters were condemned to its waters until ‘Tomorrow’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was musing a few evenings ago about the Greek word for tomorrow and how we can joke that the word avrio (αύριο) can never convey the same urgency that mañana has in Spanish.

Our anxieties about tomorrow are raised again in the Gospel reading tomorrow (Matthew 6: 25-34), when Jesus says: ‘But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith? … Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own’ (Matthew 6: 30, 34).

Tomorrow seemed to be a far-away world to us as children on those Sunday afternoons when we were regularly brought on family outings to the ‘Vee’, a scenic, V-shaped hairpin bend in the Knockmealdown Mountains, with spectacular views across the Golden Vale and three counties, Waterford, Tipperary and Cork.

At the Vee we were halfway between Cappoquin and Clogheen, and only a few miles from my grandmother’s farm, we were entertained with stories and tales about Samuel Grubb and the grave where he was buried standing, and about ‘Petticoat Loose’ and the monsters in Bay Lough, the ‘bottomless’ lake, who came up and asked, day after day, ‘Is it tomorrow.’

The grave of Samuel Grubb overlooking the Vee and the Golden Vale (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Samuel Richard Grubb (1855-1921) was a wealthy landowner of Quaker descent and a former High Sheriff of Co Tipperary. His distinctive, beehive-shape grave stands on Sugarloaf Hill overlooking the Vee and the Golden Vale. He said he wanted to be buried on the mountainside, standing upright, so that he could keep watch over ‘his people’ and ‘his fields’ at Castle Grace, where he farmed over 1,600 acres.

Before he died, Grubb designed his grave of rubble stone, looking like one of the clochans on the Great Skellig. Some say he asked to be buried there because the Grubb family had been by the Society of Friends or Quakers before Samuel was born for attending ‘balls at which music and dancing form a chief part’.

Grubb died on 6 September 1921 and was buried four days later, with the Revd J Talbot of Clogheen conducting the burial service. Grubb was buried standing up, with his dog beside him, although some people in the area said the men who buried him put him in the grave upside down.

From his grave 2,000 ft up in the mountains, there are panoramic views across the Golden Vale, and of the Galtee Mountains, the Comeragh Mountains and Slievenamon. On clear summer days as we looked across the valley below, and the villages of Clogheen, Ardfinnan and Ballyporeen (later known as the ancestral home of Ronald Reagan) were pointed out to us, and the towns of Cahir and Clonmel. The Grubb family sold Castle Grace near Clogheen in 2019, although many of his descendants continue to live in the area, including Nicholas Grubb who lives in Dromana House at Villierstown, near Cappoquin.

The panoramic view from the Vee across south Tipperary (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Close to the Vee Gap, on the county boundaries of Waterford and Tipperary, Bay Lough is on the side of Knockaunabulloga in the Knockmealdown Mountains, close to Saint Declan’s Way, the path Saint Declan trod as he made his way from Ardmore to Cashel.

Bay Lough is easily accessed from a car park on the Co Waterford side of the lake. Many people believe it is a ‘bottomless’ lake and that it is not possible to swim across it, even though it is quite small. In late May and early June, the rhododendrons are in bloom at the lake, providing spectacular views from Bay Lough to Clogheen.

Folklore in South Tipperary and West Waterford says the lake is the place where Petticoat Loose was banished, condemned as penance to drain the ‘bottomless’ lake with a thimble until tomorrow came.

Local folklore portrays Petticoat Loose as a vengeful ghost, a banshee or a haunting witch and sometimes identify her as Mary Hannigan. She was said to be a 6-ft tall, strong woman who did a man’s work on the farm, drank like a man, fought like a man and wrestled and fought the local men when they mocked her. But she was known too for adulterating milk and for her wicked behaviour. They say she killed a bull with a single blow of her first, killed a farmhand with his own spade, and threatened to kill anyone who told on her.

Mary Hannigan was born in the early 19th century, the only child of a well-to-do farming family who lived in the townland of Colligan, near Clogheen, and she was known for her love of dancing and drinking. During one drunken dance, as she spun around, her skirt was caught on a nail and fell to the ground, causing mirth and leading to laughter and jeering. The incident raised her anger and left her with the name ‘Petticoat Lucy’ or ‘Petticoat Loose’.

She met her future husband on the dance floor, but the marriage lasted only a year, and he met an early death. Local people whispered that Mary’s lover, a local hedge-school teacher, had murdered him.

Then, one night during a drinking session in a pub in Dungarvan, Mary drank half a gallon of beer, suddenly slumped forward onto the table and died. There was a big wake but no priest was called, even for the burial.

Seven years after her death, there were several sightings of Petticoat Loose, seen as a ghost with red hair or as a monstrous horse-headed figure who had returned to haunt people on the Vee road. She was also seen in the pubs and dance halls and became the terror of the Vee road, although – for some inexplicable reason – she never harmed any man with the name John.

She continued to haunt the Vee road close to Bay Lough, and it became a common practice for people travelling at night to carry religious relics or hazel sticks as protection.

Finally, people who were living in fear of Petticoat Lucy called on a local priest to rid the area of Mary and her nightly visits. One night, the priest and two men spotted her coming across a field. When the priest asked her name, she replied ‘I’m Petticoat Loose’, telling him she would do evil wherever she was.

‘We will see’, the priest replied. ‘I will place you head downwards.’ He took out a bottle of holy water and sent her to the far banks of the deepest lake, telling her: ‘You shall be condemned until judgment day to empty it with a thimble!’

The priest is said to have died two weeks later – some say she had drained the life out of him.

Many people say Petticoat Loose still sits on the far bank of Bay Lough with her thimble, vainly trying to empty the lake, waiting for tomorrow. Some say she sometimes appears out of the water and asks the same questions over and over again: ‘When will judgment day come?’ ‘Is it tomorrow?’

She is often associated with other spirits and monsters trapped in the lake by Saint Patrick. He told them to stay there and wait, and that he would be back tomorrow. So, they are still there, deep in the dark waters, waiting for tomorrow. Petticoat Loose, or one of the monsters, is said to surface occasionally to ask ‘Is it tomorrow?’

It is only possible to walk about half way around Bay Lough and few ever swim in the lake (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Bay Lough is a favourite for walkers and family outings, although it is only possible to walk about half way around the lake, and few ever swim in it, frightened off by tales that Petticoat Loose waits below to grab your legs and pull you down.

Perhaps the idle tale that Samuel Grubb was buried upside down was conflated or confused with the story that Petticoat Loose had been sent head down into the lake. As children we revelled in those stories, pretending to be only slightly scared. But in the 1950s and the early 1960s, the men in the family had probably driven up to the Vee and Bay Lough to get better radio reception.

Back on my grandmother’s farm near Cappoquin, in a valley below the Knockmealdowns, the mountains often blocked reception of what was then Radio Éireann. Instead, I grew up listening to the BBC Light Programme, nourished by a daily diet of programmes that included the Archers, Mrs Dales Diary, Hancock’s Half Hour, Housewives’ Choice, Listen with Mother, Woman’s Hour, and, of course, the Goons. Petticoat Loose may have been as far from Petticoat Lane as I could imagine, yet I understand how I grew up in rural Ireland with Received Pronunciation or ‘BBC English’ as my first language.

In those years, the Waterford hurlers were at their peak, reaching the All-Ireland finals in 1957, 1959 and 1963, and the men in the family needed better reception to hear the match commentaries. The ‘wireless’ was taken from the house, brought with us up to Bay Lough or Grubb’s Grave and connected to the car battery so my uncles could listen to Mícheál Ó hEithir’s match commenaties while we children played and picknicked by the lake shore or on the mountainside.

As a treat later, we were brought back to the ‘Cats’ near Melleray for lemonade and crisps, while the men celebrated the match result – or drowned their sorrows. Later we might even be allowed to listen to the music or watch the dancing at the ‘Stage’ … if we behaved ourselves.

The working week resumed on Monday morning. Cows were to be milked, animals had to be fed, there was shopping to do in Cappoquin, and children had to go to school. Tomorrow always came.

Tomorrow brought work, school and shopping in Cappoquin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Ikerrin Crown

Brian Boru depicted wearing the ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’ in Dermod O’Connor’s 1723 edition of Geoffrey Keating’s ‘The General History of Ireland’

Patrick Comerford

Introduction

The “Comerford Crown” or “Ikerrin Crown” is a long-lost archaeological artefact probably dating from the Bronze Age. It was discovered in the Devil’s Bit, near Ikerrin, Co. Tipperary, in 1692 and was taken to France by the Comerford family who owned it for over a century, until the mid-1790s, when it was lost during the ‘Reign of Terror’ in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Although it has not been seen for almost two and a half centuries – perhaps even three and a half centuries – the “Comerford Crown” or “Ikerrin Crown” remains an object of fascination. Although its function was never ascertained and remains uncertain, it became a symbol of Irish identity in the early nineteenth century, and is said to informed the design in 1843 of Daniel O’Connell’s green velvet “Repeal Cap”.

The crown is sometimes referred to by archaeologists as the “Devil’s Bit Mountain gold cap.” The “Milesian Crown” was a more popular term in the nineteenth century because of the symbol that was based on this crown or inspired by it.

The ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’ depicted in the ‘Dublin Penny Journal’, Vol 1, No 9 (25 August 1832)

Despite all the speculation about the crown, it remains an enigma. The image used in a depiction of Brian Boru in 1723 is noticeably different from the image of it published over a century later in the Dublin Penny Journal (Vol 1, No 9, 25 August 1832), 140 years after it was discovered, and half a century it was said to have been lost.

These are two contradictory and irreconcilable illustrations. No-one has established with certainty either the function or fate of the crown, and the myths Joseph Comerford created for his own genealogical past make the rescuer of the crown as much a mystery as the object itself.

Château d’Anglure … it gave Joseph Comerford an estate and a French title, but what happened to the crown?

The discovery and rescue of the crown

The “Comerford Crown” or “Ikerrin Crown” was an encased gold cap or crown that was discovered 10ft underground by turf-cutters, at the Devil’s Big in Co. Tipperary in 1692. After its discovery, Joseph Comerford bought the crown, and saved it from being melted down. But who was this Joseph Comerford? And why was he in Ikerrin in 1692.

Joseph Comerford, who bought the crown, became the Marquis d’Anglure in France and claimed to be Baron of Danganmore in Ireland and the head of the Comerford family. He took the crown from Ireland to France when he bought a château in the Champagne region, and the crown may have been lost a century later during the Reign of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Joseph Comerford is an enigmatic members of the Comerford family. His origins and place in the family tree have been obscured by his own obfuscation: the family pedigree he registered in Dublin was a self-serving exercise in vanity, aimed at asserting his claim to nobility that would underpin the French aristocratic title he acquired when he bought a château and petit domain in Champagne.

The plaques he erected in the Comerford chapel in Saint Mary’s Parish Church, Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and the Comberford Chapel in Saint Editha’s Parish Church, Tamworth, Staffordshire, were proud but vain efforts by him to link the Comerford family in Co. Kilkenny with the Comberford family of Comberford Hall in the Lichfield and Tamworth area of Staffordshire.

The plaque erected by Joseph Comerford in the Comberford Chapel in the North Transept of Saint Editha’s Church, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Although Joseph Comerford claimed on those monuments that his family had been brought low by the ravages of civil wars in Ireland and in England, he appears to have remained in Ireland for some years after the defeat of the Jacobites in the 1690s, without any obvious social, political or financial disadvantage. While he eagerly craved acceptance in French aristocratic circles, the title he acquired has never continued in use in the Comerford family.

Joseph Comerford, the eldest son of Edward Comerford of Clonmel, Co Tipperary, was sworn a freeman of the City of Waterford, on 10 December 1686. He subsequently was commissioned a captain in the Earl of Tyrone’s regiment of foot, a Waterford regiment (despite its name) in the army of James II.

Despite the terms of the Treaty of Limerick following the defeat of the Jacobite cause, Joseph Comerford was still living in Ireland in 1692. In that year, he bought the “Ikerrin Crown,” an encased gold cap or crown weighing about 5 oz, that was discovered 10 ft underground by turf-cutters, and he saved it from being melted down.

Soon after, Joseph Comerford moved to France, and took the crown with him. As Joseph de Comerford of Clonmel, he received letters of naturalisation in France in January 1711. In exile in France, he was made a Chevalier of St Louis, bought the Anglure estate on the banks of the River Aule in Champagne, including the Château d’Anglure, and claimed the title of Marquis d’Anglure by right of purchase. He may be the Comerford who appears as Baron d’Enguemore in Reitstrap’s Armorial.

However, Joseph Comerford returned to Ireland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when he was living in Cork, and he had moved to Dublin by April 1724, when he registered a fanciful family pedigree at the Ulster Office of Arms in Dublin Castle.

At this time, or soon after, Joseph Comerford probably erected the monument to his great-grandfather, Thomas Comerford, in Saint Mary’s Church, Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and the plaque in the Comberford Chapel in Tamworth, Staffordshire, which is dated 1725. I was involved in the commemorations in Tamworth on 1 April 2025 to mark the centenary of the plaque in the Comberford Chapel.

Joseph Comerford returned to France soon after, and on 28 November 1725, as Joseph de Comerford, he bequeathed the Anglure estate, including “the grounds and seigniories of Mesnil and Granges,” 3km west of Anglure, to his nephew, Louis Luc de Comerford.

When he died in 1729, Joseph Comerford’s will was proved in Paris. Another will, dated 19 May 1729, went to probate in Dublin that year. He was buried in the chapel at the Château d’Anglure not under the title of Marquis d’Anglure but as Baron d’Anglure et Dangermore.

Joseph Comerford and his wife Margaret (née Browne) were the parents of an only daughter, Jane Barbara. But there was no male heir to inherit his claims and titles. Instead, he designated his brother, Captain Luc Luke Comerford as his heir. In default of male heirs, Joseph settled his estates in Champagne on the heirs male of his brother Luke Comerford, and in default of such heirs male on his kinsman, Major-General John Comerford, and his male issue.

Captain Louis-Luc Comerford of Sézanne, north of Anglure, became Seigneur d’Anglure as heir to his uncle Joseph. He appears to have sold the Anglure title and estate in the mid-18th century. According to an advertisement dated 12 June 1752, a quarter of a century after Joseph Comerford’s death, Anglure was associated with the title of a barony from “time out of memory” and with the title of Marquis d’Anglure which was created in 1657.

Louis-Luc de Comerford, who was financially ruined, sold his estates, including Anglure, Mesnil and Granges-sur-Aube, and Belle-Assise, to Jean de Cabanel and retired to Sézanne, north of Anglure, where he lived in dire poverty.

After Louis-Luc Comerford died, his next brother, Captain Pierre-Edouard Comerford, used the title of Baron Dangermore (sic), but he made no pretensions to the Anglure titles. This branch of the Comerford family survived into the early nineteenth century, but died out in 1813 with the death of Captain Joseph-Alexandre-Antoine Comerford (1757-1813). Since then, the titles have never been assumed or claimed by any member of the family.

What happened to the Crown?

But what happened to the “Comerford Crown” that Joseph Comerford saved from being melted down after it was found in Ikerrin and that he took with him to Anglure in France? The eventual fate of the ‘Comerford Crown’ remains a mystery. The crown appears to have survived in safe hands for long time after Joseph’s death. In his Histoire d’Irlande (1758), the Abbé MacGeoghegan suggested it was still preserved in Anglure.

Some accounts say the crown may have been melted down for its intrinsic value in the aftermath of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror between September 1793 and July 1794.

However, others claimed that the crown had survived the Reign of Terror. A contributor to the Dublin Penny Journal in August 1832 claimed that the crown was then still preserved in the Château d’Anglure. It was owned by Paul Emmanuel Tissandier (1805-1870). But Dr Czerwinski, whose father bought the château in 1832 from the Tissandier family, said: “I never heard anyone speak about the piece of antiquity that you refer to.”

Crown or Bronze Age “hat”

The ‘Comerford Crown’ is not the only Bronze Age “hat” recorded in Ireland. In the late 17th century, a second, similar gold crown or vessel was found nearby at the Bog of Cullen, Co. Tipperary. Known locally as the Golden Bog, due to the sheer quantity of artefacts recovered from its depths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this morass appears to have been an important ritual site in the Late Bronze Age.

Unfortunately, very few of the objects found in the bog have survived to the present day and the gold “crown” is no different. It was bought in 1744 by a Limerick jeweller, Joseph Kinshalloe, who melted down the artefact to produce 6 ounces worth of gold. Another gold ‘crown’, described rather unusually as shaped like a shell, was also discovered at Kilpeacon, Co. Limerick, in 1821. Regrettably, this object was melted down too for bullion.

The original function of these elaborate gold objects remains uncertain. If they were indeed crowns, then they were probably worn with an inner head-dress or lining that has not survived. They probably belonged to people of high status who wore them during specific ceremonies or rituals.

Another theory suggests ‘hats’ like these adorned wooden statutes or totems that may have depicted local deities. But it has also been argued that these precious items are not in fact crowns, but instead gold bowls or vessels, as with some of the artefacts from the Eberswalde hoard in Germany, which appear too small to fit a human head.

Influence and legacy

The ‘Comerford Crown’ inspired the illustration of Brian Boru wearing the “Milesian Crown” in the frontispiece of Dermod O’Connor’s edition of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, published in Dublin in 1723 as The General History of Ireland. This crown was based on the ‘Comerford Crown,’ and it was used to represent the crown of the provincial kings of Ireland.

Elizabeth FitzPatrick of NUI Galway suggests that because the “Comerford Crown” was found in Munster it inspired the 18th century illustrator of Brian Bóruma “to add it to the Munster king’s royal paraphernalia”.

Over three decades later, the Abbé MacGeoghegan, James MacGeoghegan (1702-1763), in his Histoire d’Irlande (1758), described this gold crown as being in the shape of a bonnet, and added: “This curious part of antiquity was sold to Joseph Comerford and must be preserved in the Castle of Anglure, where he had bought the estate.”

By the early nineteenth century, the shamrock and the harp were the most widely used symbols of Irish identity. The Galway historian, Dr Emily Cullen of NUI Galway, shows how the harp came to be fused with the imperial crown of England, the cap of liberty, the sunburst and the “Comerford Crown” or “Milesian Crown” as one of the principal emblems of Irish identity.

This “Milesian Crown,” based on the “Comerford Crown,” was fused with the harp in an emblem used in 1840 to illustrate the frontispiece to Edward Bunting’s third edition of The Ancient Music of Ireland. This frontispiece consolidated the iconic appeal of the Milesian Crown. Bunting’s emblem of the “Milesian Crown” is based on the 1723 illustration in Dermod O’Connor’s translation of Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, which, in turn, is based on the “Comerford Crown”.

While Bunting dedicated this third edition to Queen Victoria, he inserted the Milesian Crown above the harp with the symbol of a wakened nationalism, the sunburst, as a declaration of a separate Irish feudal tradition. Scholars point how that it is notable that the “Comerford Crown,” and not the British crown, was placed above the harp in this image. Emily Cullen points out that instead of ambiguously employing the radiated “Irish crown” above the harp, Bunting purposefully differentiated the provincial Irish crown from that of the British one, through a distinctive design.

Three years after Bunting’s use of the “Comerford Crown,” it also informed the design in 1843 of Daniel O’Connell’s green velvet “Repeal Cap,” which played a crucial iconic role in the construction of his public image.

The artists John Hogan and Henry MacManus used the “Comerford Crown” to design the green velvet “Milesian cap” or “cap of liberty” that they presented to Daniel O’Connell at the “monster meeting” on the Rath of Mullaghmast, near Athy, Co. Kildare, in 1843. An advertisement in The Nation for a copy of the cap, which was mass-produced for sale, pointed out, it was modelled upon “the old Milesian Crown of Gold, dug up AD 1692, at Barnanely, of the Devil’s Bit, County Tipperary, and brought to France by Joseph Comerford, Esq., afterward Marquis of Anglure in Champagne.”

A year later, this harp and crown became the symbol of Ireland on the membership card of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association of 1844. On that card, the harp is surrounded by the sunburst and by Irish political figures including Henry Grattan, Henry Flood, Patrick Sarsfield, Owen Roe O’Neill, Brian Boru and Ollamh Fodhla.

Ollamh Fodhla, reputedly the first Milesian king of Ireland, is wearing the “Comerford Crown” or “Milesian Crown” which is also placed beneath the harp in the central image.

The symbols of Ireland in the centre include a sword, shield, wreath of shamrock and the Milesian Crown. Saint Patrick’s head forms the stem of the device, while a smaller shamrock is inscribed “Remember 1782,” a reference to Grattan’s Parliament.

O’Connell’s followers were deeply moved by the idea of an indigenous Milesian Crown. It came to represent a modern-day Irish crown and was symptomatic of its wearer’s brazen audacity. Throughout the mid to late 1840s, Daniel O’Connell was frequently depicted a mocking way in Punch wearing this Milesian Crown.

O’Connor’s illustration of the “Comerford Crown” in 1723 also gave rise to sporadic curiosity about the artefact on the pages of journals in the nineteenth century. The Dublin Penny Journal claimed the crown was “perfectly eastern” in its “style and workmanship” and “unlike everything of the kind used in Europe within historic times.

A crowned Brian Boru on the east wall of the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

O’Connell is depicted wearing the crown in an image on the west door of Saint James’s Church, Dublin, designed by Patrick Byrne in 1844. The crown also appears on a head of Brian Boru on the walls of the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle, and as a label stop in the Church of the Holy Cross in Charleville, Co. Cork, designed by Maurice A Hennessy in 1898.

It is surprising, then, that the “Comerford Crown” did not appear in the motifs designed for the Irish House on the corner of Winetavern Street and Wood Quay, or the Oarsman in Ringsend, two Dublin pubs designed in the 1890s by my great-grandfather James Comerford (1817-1902), when his other depictions include Round Towers, Irish wolfhounds, Erin with a stingless harp, and political figures such as Grattan, Flood and O’Connell.

Daniel O’Connell wearing the ‘Milesian Crown’ in an image at the west door of Saint James’s Church, Dublin, designed in 1844 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Conclusions

Emily Cullen argues that the pairing of the Irish harp emblem with the Milesian Crown is a distinctive and neglected development in nineteenth century iconic discourses. She adds, “It is important, however, to update the Comerford Crown story for a variety of reasons, not least because the authority of this crown was challenged by some as just a decorative vessel.”

She points out that the use of the “Comerford Crown” as a symbol to stand in for the history of a provincial Irish king represents “an attempted transfer of authority to an indigenous Irish crown, a separate iconographic tradition and, ultimately, the dilution of authority of the British Crown.”

In her conclusions, she says, “The fact that there is still a degree of uncertainty about the functions of the Comerford Crown underlines the fact that the harp was juxtaposed with equivocal symbols and, thereby, implicated in speculative narratives that were rendered no less powerful for their ambivalence. Unlike, however, the ‘missing’ Comerford Crown, long transferred to Anglure in France, the Irish harp retains its symbolic authority.”

Further Reading:

Emily Cullen, ‘From the Comerford Crown to the Repeal Cap: Fusing the Irish harp symbol with eastern promise in the nineteenth century,’ in Visual Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp 59-72.

Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c.1100–1600: a cultural landscape Study (Studies in Celtic History series Vol 22, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004).

Geoffrey Keating, The General History of Ireland, translated by Dermod O’Connor (Dublin: James Carson, 1723).

Abbé James Mac Geogheghan, Histoire de l’Irlande ancienne et moderne (Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1758, vol 1), pp 100-101.

The Abbé MacGeoghegan, The History of Ireland, Ancient and Modern (tr Patrick O’Kelly (New York: DJ Sadlier, 1845), p 75.

The Dublin Penny Journal, Vol 1, No 9 (25 August 1832).

Joseph Comerford’s pedigree, Genealogical Office Ms 160, ff 102-104.

Biographical note (p 203):

Parick Comerford is an Anglican priest He has been and a former professor in Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. He lives in retirement near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

•This paper was first published in Under Crimblin Hill: Historical Journal of Dunkerrin Parish Historical Society Vol 5 2026 (ed Professor Salvador Ryan), pp 20-27 (Dunkerrin, Co Offaly, 29 November 2025)

A missed opportunity to visit Barack Obama at the launch of a history journal in Moneygall

A visit to the Barack Obama Plaza near Moneygall and Dunkerrin some years ago

Patrick Comerford

I had an invitation to the Barack Obama last night but couldn’t get there.

No, it was not an invitation to meet Barack Obama. But it was invitation to the launch of the latest issue of Under Crimblin Hill, the Historical Journal of the Dunkerrin Parish History Society, edited by my friend and colleague, Professor Salvador Ryan of Maynooth.

The Barack Obama Plaza is a motorway service area at Junction 23 on the M7 motorway in Co Tipperary, and beside the village of Moneygall, just across the county border in Co Offaly. For the five years I was living in Askeaton, Co Limerick, as priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale Group of Parishes, this had been a regular ‘pit stop’ on the road to and frame Dublin.

The Barack Obama Plaza is named after President Barack Obama, whose great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, lived in Moneygall and emigrated to the US in 1850. The plaza opened in 2014, and includes an Obama museum-visitor centre, a bronze bust of Barack Obama by Mark Rhodes, and life-sized bronze sculptures of Barack and Michelle Obama, also by Mark Rhodes.

When Barack Obama visited Moneygall in 2011, he met distant relatives and drank a pint in Ollie Hayes’s Pub, where Michelle Obama tried her hand at pouring a pint.

The nearby village of Dunkerrin, Co Offaly, is just south of Roscrea and near the Co Tipperary border and junction 23 at Moneygall. Dunkerrin Parish History Society was revived in 2014 after a 25-year lapse, and launched its journal Under Crimblin Hill that year.

So, the Barack Obama Plaza was an appropriate and convenient venue for the launch of the latest edition of Under Crimblin Hill last night, when the guest speaker was local artist Philip Ryan, who launched this latest edition (volume 5, 2026).

Salvador Ryan invited me to contribute to this edition of the journal with a paper on the ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’, a long-lost archaeological artefact probably dating from the Bronze Age. It was discovered in the Devil’s Bit, near Ikerrin. Co Tipperary, in 1692 and was taken to France by the Comerford family who owned it for over a century, until the mid-1790s, when it was lost during the ‘Reign of Terror’ in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Although it has not been seen for almost 2½ centuries – perhaps even 3½ centuries – the ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’ remains an object of fascination. Although its function was never ascertained and remains uncertain, it became a symbol of Irish identity in the early 19th century, and is said to informed the design in 1843 of Daniel O’Connell’s green velvet ‘Repeal Cap’.

The crown is sometimes referred to by archaeologists as the ‘Devil’s Bit Mountain gold cap.’ The ‘Milesian Crown’ was a more popular term in the 19th century because of the symbol that was based on this crown or inspired by it. Yet, despite all the speculation about the crown, it remains an enigma.

I was so sorry to miss the launch of the journal last night, but I hope to receive a copy when I meet Salvador at the launch of his latest book, Childhood and the Irish, in Dublin next week.

Meanwhile, more about the journal, the Comerford Crown, and that new book in the days or weeks to come, hopefully.

Saint Edmund, the English king and martyr who almost replaced Saint Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland

Saint Edmund depicted in a window in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Saint Patrick’s Day always falls in Lent, and this year it coincides with the Fifth Sunday in Lent, which used to be known in the Church Calendar as Passion Sunday, marking the beginning of the two-week period of Passiontide before Easter Day.

To mark Saint Patrick’s Day this year, the latest edition of the new Dominican journal Conversations, edited by Bernard Treacy, has published a paper by me, asking: ‘Did St Patrick Bring Christianity to Ireland?’

Throughout Lent this year, in my prayer diary on my blog each morning, I am looking at the life and influence of an early, pre-Reformation English saint or martyr commemorated in the Church of England in the calendar of Common Worship.

This morning, I was reflecting on Saint Edmund, the ninth century king, who was martyred in 869 or 870 and who is commemorated Common Worship on 20 November. As I was researching his life and story, I came across the fascinating claim that Saint Edmund almost supplanted Saint Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland in the 14th century.

Perhaps, after England’s defeat of Ireland at Twickenham yesterday, I dare not suggest that Saint Patrick was probably what we would today call an Englishman. Of course, that is a form of an anchronism, as the Angles had not yet arrived in former Roman Britain by the time of Saint Patric. But the story of another English saint, Saint Edmund, and how he almost replaced Saint Patrick as the patron of Ireland, has been told recently by Dr Francis Young in his book Athassel Priory and the Cult of St Edmund in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020), and in a feature that year in History Ireland, ‘St Edmund: Patron Saint of Ireland?’

Saint Edmund was the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia when he was shot through with arrows and finally beheaded by Viking invaders. His shrine at Beodricesworth, the Suffolk town that later became Bury St Edmunds, was an important centre of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. By the end of the 11th century, Saint Edmund was seen throughout Europe as the patron saint of England and his shrine church at Bury St Edmunds was of the largest Romanesque churches ever built. He became the patron saint of pandemics as well as kings, and he remained the patron saint of England until he was supplanted by Saint George.

At an early stage, Saint Edmund also became a popular saint in Ireland. A hoard of coins minted by 10th-century Vikings in memory of Saint Edmund within a century of his death, was found in Co Offaly in the 19th century. It seems Saint Edmund was also popular in Norse Dublin by the early 11th century, and he is named in the 12th century Irish text, the Félire Húi Gormán or Martyrology of Gorman.

Following the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169-1170, a chapel was dedicated to Saint Edmund in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Francis Young wonders whether devotion to Saint Edmund was been brought back to Ireland by knights who fought under the banner of Saint Edmund to save the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1173. Or, he suggests, there is the possibility that the chapel was partly funded by English merchants from East Anglia, as merchants from Chester had paid for Saint Werburgh’s Church in Dublin.

Saint Edmund depicted in a window in Saint Mary’s Church in Whitby, Yorkshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Francis Young is a writer historian who was born in Bury St Edmunds. He studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Classics at the University of Wales, Lampeter, before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He points out that the early leading Anglo-Normans in Ireland included William de Burgh (died 1206), who took his name from the village of Burgh-next-Aylsham in Norfolk, and who was ancestor of the powerful Burke or Bourke family. Young argues that William de Burgh’s devotion to Saint Edmund is explained by his origins in East Anglia. William founded two significant churches dedicated to Saint Edmund – one at Ardoyne, Co Carlow, and the other at Athassel Priory, near Golden, Co Tipperary.

Athassel Priory became the largest mediaeval priory in Ireland and for 300 years it was the centre of the veneration of Saint Edmund in Ireland for the next 300 years. Saint Edmund’s status as the patron of England gave Athassel a special status for the English of Ireland.

At the beginning of the reign of Richard II (1377-1399), a monk of Bury St Edmunds claimed that Athassel Priory held a miraculous image of Saint Edmund. The story claimed that immediately before the death of the head of the Burke family of Clanwilliam, the image of Saint Edmund would hurl the spear it was holding onto the pavement of the choir. The monk named Saint Edmund as the patron saint of Ireland, describing him as ‘the protector and defender of that whole land.’

The claim that Saint Edmund was the patron saint of Ireland could easily be dismissed as the ramblings of an English monk, Young writes. But, he points, nine years later, when Richard II gave the title ‘Duke of Ireland’ to Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in 1386, he also gave him the right to quarter his coat of arms with the arms of Saint Edmund (three gold crowns on a blue background) – for as long as he remained Lord of Ireland.

The three crowns of Saint Edmund were used as an emblem of English royalty from as early as 1276, and, from 1460, the three crowns of Saint Edmund appeared on coins minted in Dublin in the name of the king. However, Saint Edmund’s significance in England had been declining steadily from the mid-14th century, and by the 15th century Saint George was well established as the patron saint of the Order of the Garter and of England’s military.

Under the Tudors, Saint George became the sole patron of England and Saint Edmund lost his popular appeal. When Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1542, the three crowns of Saint Edmund disappeared from Irish coins, replaced by the harp. By then, it appears, the original meaning of the three crowns was forgotten, and Henry VIII’s officials thought they represented the triple tiara of the pope and the papacy’s long-standing claim to Ireland as a papal fief.

Young sees lingering traces of the mediaeval importance of the cult of Saint Edmund in the flag of Munster, with three gold crowns on a blue background. The flag is first recorded in the 17th century, but Young tries to link it with the Butler family, Earls of Ormond, who had replaced the Burkes as patrons of Athassel Priory in the early 16th century.

He sees a further trace of the once-prominent cult of Saint Edmund in Ireland in the persistence of the name Edmund and its Irish equivalent Éamon, popular in Ireland since the 14th century. Éamon was one of the few male names of English origin to gain widespread popularity in Gaelic Ireland in the Middle Ages. The earliest individuals to bear the name in Ireland were members of the Burke or Bourke and Butler families, successive patrons of Athassel Priory. The earliest Gaelic Irish families to adopt Éamon as a forename were the septs of Ó Broin (O’Byrne) and Ó Cinnéide (O’Kennedy), clients of the Butlers of Ormond.

The name Edmund or Edmond is first found in the Comerford family, thanks perhaps to close connections with the Butlers of Ormond, in the person of Edmund Comerford from Co Kilkenny, who died in 1509. He was educated at Oxford, and was Rector of Saint Mary’s, Callan, Prior of Saint John’s, Kilkenny, a canon and then Dean of Saint Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and Bishop of Ferns (1505-1509). Although Hore, Leslie, Foster and Gillespie incorrectly give his name as ‘Edward,’ although he is named Edmund in Cotton, Carrigan and Crockford’s, and is called both Edmond and Edmund by Grattan-Flood.

Edmund’s brother, Richard Comerford, was the direct ancestor of the Comerford families of Ballybur and Bunclody, and the name Edmund continued to be passed down in the Comerford family through Edmund Comerford (1722-1788), until my father’s generation: the eldest brother he never knew was Edmond Joseph Comerford (1900-1905).

Saint Edmund’s connection with Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, continues. A stained glass window by Clayton and Bell in the Baptistry depicting Saint Edmund was presented by the architect George Edmund Street (1824-1881) in memory of his second wife Jessie (1843-1876). They were married on 11 January 1876, but she contracted typhoid fever during their honeymoon in Rome and died on 6 March 1876, eight weeks after their wedding.

However, Saint Edmund’s brief time as patron saint of Ireland in the late Middle Ages was long forgotten until Francis Young published his research in recent years.

Further Reading:

Anthony Bale (ed), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York Medieval Press, 2009).
Francis Young, Edmund: in search of England’s lost king (London: IB Taurus, 2018).
Francis Young, Athassel Priory and the cult of St Edmund in medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020).
Francis Young, ‘St Edmund: patron saint of Ireland?’, History Ireland (July/August 2020), Vol 28 No 4.

The Chapel of Saint Edmund in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Last edited: 14 March 2024

The Sephardic family roots and heritage of John Desmond Bernal, Limerick scientist

John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) … one of the most interesting and important Irish-born scientists of the last century

by Patrick Comerford

Introducing JD Bernal[1]

John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) was one of the most interesting and important Irish-born scientists of the twentieth century. JD Bernal was born near Nenagh, Co Tipperary, on 10 May 1901, and died in London on 15 September 1971. But he had strong family roots in nineteenth century Limerick and many members of his immediate family are buried near the south porch of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick. The Bernal family grave is in a quiet corner of the cathedral churchyard, facing the south porch and door, and many of us also know or are familiar with the Bernal Institute on the campus of the University of Limerick.

John Desmond Bernal, crystallographer, molecular physicist, social scientist, committed Communist, campaigner for world peace, and friend of Pablo Picasso, was the eldest child of Samuel George Bernal (1864-1919) of Brookwatson, near Nenagh, and his wife, Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Miller, who had married the previous year. Samuel George Bernal’s father, JD Bernal’s grandfather, was John Bernal (1819-1898) of Albert Lodge, Laurel Hill, Limerick.[2]

The Bernal grave in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Many people thought Bernal was a member of the family of the prominent Victorian politician, Ralph Bernal Osborne (1808-1882), of Newtown Anner House, Co Tipperary, who was a Liberal MP for a number of English constituencies (1841-1868) before becoming MP for Waterford (1870-1874).[3] But, in fact, John Bernal of Limerick was born Jacob de Isaac Haim Genese. His ancestors had been Sephardic Jews who lived in Venice from at least the mid-seventeenth century, and before that they had lived in the Ancona area of southern Italy for many generations. The family moved through Amsterdam to London, and Jacob arrived in Ireland in the 1840s from London.

When Jacob de Isaac Haim Genese settled in Ireland, he changed his name to John Bernal and joined the Church of Ireland. He married Catherine Maria Carroll in Dublin in 1841, and she brought up their children as Roman Catholics.[4]

Their son, Samuel George Bernal, was born in Limerick on 22 May 1864. At the age of 20, he ran away from Limerick to Australia in 1884, and there he worked on a sheep farm. When his father died in 1898, he returned to live in Ireland and at first stayed with his sister, Margaret Riggs-Miller, at Tullaheady, just outside Nenagh, Co Tipperary.

Brookwatson near Nenagh, Co Tipperary, the childhood home of the scientist John Desmond Bernal (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Later that year, he bought the farm in Brookwatson on the Portumna road outside Nenagh, and built the present house. On a visit to continental Europe, he met his future wife, Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Miller (1869-1951), in Belgium. Bessie was an energetic, educated and much-travelled woman, the daughter of an Irish-born Presbyterian minister from Co Antrim, the Revd William Young Miller of Illinois. She became a Roman Catholic before they married on 9 January 1900. They were the parents of five children, three sons and two daughters, including John Desmond Bernal, who was the eldest child, and Kevin O’Carroll Diaz Bernal (1903-1996), who continued to run the family farm.

There was less than a two-year age gap between the brothers John Desmond and Kevin, and as boys they were very close for many years. At first, they both went to the local convent school, but they later went to the Church of Ireland national school in Nenagh. However, the young John Desmond Bernal was a devout Catholic throughout his school days.[5]

In 1910, Samuel Bernal decided to send his two eldest sons to school in Lancashire, first to Hodder Place, the Jesuit preparatory school, and then Stonyhurst, the leading Jesuit-run public school in England. At Stonyhurst, John would recall, he worked his way through the school library each Sunday after Mass. After a short time at Bedford, he went on to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1919 for an undergraduate degree in Natural Science. There he developed a strong interest in the developing science of X-ray crystallography. At Cambridge too he became an active Marxist, beginning a lifelong commitment to Communism.[6]

The Bernal Institute at the University of Limerick (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

From Cambridge, Bernal joined WH Bragg in his research at the Royal Institution (RI) in 1923. In 1927, he became the first lecturer in structural crystallography at Cambridge, and he was appointed the assistant director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1934. However, he was refused fellowships at Emmanuel College and Christ’s College and tenure by Ernest Rutherford, who is said to have disliked him.[7]

Bernal remained at Cambridge until 1937, when he became Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and head of the newly established department of crystallography. His research included the first X-ray diffraction pattern of a protein and ground-breaking work on the structure of viruses and proteins that lead to the foundation of molecular biology. This development fundamentally changed the focus of biochemical research and the understanding of biological activity as it made it possible to examine the 3-D chemical structure of the component species.[8]

At Birkbeck, he founded the Biomolecular Research Laboratory in 1948, and it later became the internationally renowned Crystallography Department. As Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, and later as Professor of Crystallography, he presided over a centre of excellence that was celebrated worldwide. Bernal would identify new fields to explore but then leave them to trusted colleagues. He wrote several books, published 224 scientific papers and almost 400 articles, lectured regularly on scientific and political topics worldwide and was involved in the foundation of UNESCO. During World War II, Bernal worked on operational research, contributing to the planning of the D-day landings and the US honoured him with the Medal of Freedom in 1945. Later, he was interested in rebuilding Britain and initiated research into the structure and properties of metal hydroxides and the silicate components of cements.[9]

Bernal had a reputation as a selfless supporter of young scientists, and his peers referred to him affectionately as ‘Sage’. Two of his former students, Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, received Nobel prizes for pioneering work in protein crystallography for the first structural determination of vitamin B12 and haemoglobin, respectively. Perutz is known as ‘the godfather of molecular biology,’ and one of his students, Francis Crick, received the Nobel Prize for unravelling the structure of DNA with James Watson. It is remarkable, therefore, that Bernal never received a Nobel Prize, although two or three of his students did. Conventional wisdom has it that he spread himself too wide and was too involved in other matters to achieve this ultimate accolade.[10]

Bernal was driven by a belief that science and technology would improve the living standards of humanity if properly focused and he was a campaigner for peace and demilitarisation in the years after World War II. Although he had supported the Allied war effort and was involved in planning the Normandy landings, he was often ostracised in the West, with both the US and France refusing him visas in later years. Over half a century, he met many world leaders including Nehru, Khrushchev, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. He was the first president of the Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group, president of the World Peace Council and drafted the constitution for the World Federation of Scientific Workers.[11]

A story is told of Bernal’s meeting with Pablo Picasso in 1950. Picasso had come to England to attend a peace conference that Bernal was instrumental in organising. When the British government refused visas to the delegates from Eastern Europe, the conference was cancelled and some of those present retired to Bernal’s flat in London for a ‘peace party’. That evening, Picasso painted a mural on the wall of the flat in Torrington Square. The house was demolished later, but the mural survived and is now on display in London as part of the Wellcome Collection, and is known as ‘Bernal’s Picasso’.[12]

Bernal became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, but he never renounced his socialist or communist beliefs. He was to remain a thorn in the side of Western governments until the end of his days.

He married Alice Eileen Sprague in 1922, a day after receiving his BA at Cambridge. They had two sons, Mike (1926-2016) and Egan (born 1930). He was also the father of two children with the artist Margaret Gardiner (1904-2005) and a daughter with the writer Margaret Heinemann (1913-1992). John Desmond Bernal suffered a stroke in the summer of 1963, followed by a second stroke in September 1965. He retired in 1968 and died on 15 September 1971. His legacy was the development of crystallography as a central tool across the sciences. The Bernal Institute at the University of Limerick is named after JD Bernal, who remains one of the most influential and interesting Irish-born scientists of the twentieth century.[13]

John Bernal ran his business from No 9 Thomas Street, Limerick (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Tracing the Bernal family

John Desmond Bernal’s grandfather, John Bernal (1819-1898), was a Limerick auctioneer and a city councillor. He was a member of the city council for over a quarter of a century as a councillor for the Dock Ward. He had auction rooms in George Street and later at 9 Thomas Street in Limerick. When he died on 17 September 1898, he was living at Albert Lodge in Laurel Hill.[14]

As his funeral moved from his home at Laurel Hill to Saint Mary’s Cathedral along George (now O’Connell) Street, all the city businesses remained shut as a mark of respect. The Mayor of Limerick, Michael Cusack (1834-1907), attended in full regalia, along with the mace and sword bearers and all the members of the City Council. Canon James Fitzgerald Gregg (1820-1907), who officiated at the funeral, was later Dean of Limerick (1899-1905).[15]

At least three generations of the Bernal family are buried with John Bernal in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, as well as his wife Catherine Maria Carroll, who had died over 17 years earlier in 1881. They had been married in Dublin in 1841, and they had a large family of eleven children – eight daughters and three sons.

In her biographical notice of Bernal, the Nobel chemist Dorothy Hodgkin provides considerable detail about the Bernal family, tracing the earliest records back to Spanish accounts of a family of Sephardic Jews. She begins with a Bernal who was an apothecary who travelled with Columbus on his third voyage to America in 1502.[16] Abraham Nuñez Bernal was burned alive in Cordoba by the Spanish Inquisition in 1654. His brother is supposed to have fled first to Holland and then to England.[17]

The women’s balcony above the entrance to the synagogue in Córdoba … Abraham Nuñez Bernal was burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition in Córdoba in 1654 (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

A descendant of this family includes Ralph Bernal (1783-1854), a prominent Whig politician, and his son, also Ralph Bernal MP, who married a wealthy Irish heiress, Catherine Isabella Osborne (1819-1880), daughter of Sir Arthur Osborne, and became Ralph Bernal-Osborne (1808-1882). A Liberal MP, he lived at Newton Anner, near Clonmel, Co Tipperary, and they were the grandparents of Osborne Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans.[18] These connections may have given the Bernal name a note of political and aristocratic distinction around Co Limerick and Co Tipperary, and they help to explain why JD Bernal and his family emphasised their descent from the Bernal family. But the original name of JD Bernal’s grandfather, John Bernal, was Jacob de Isaac Haim Genese.

Although the Genese or Bernal family is virtually forgotten in Limerick today, they are one of the many interesting Sephardi families on these islands. The family first came to London from the Jewish Ghetto in Venice in 1749, and for long have been members of Bevis Marks Synagogue, which opened in 1701, making it the oldest working synagogue on these islands.[19]

The Scuola Italiana or Italian synagogue in the heart of the Ghetto in Venice … the Genese family were members of this synagogue (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

A genealogical excursus

In her biographical notice, Dorothy Hodgkin claims JD Bernal was descended from a Bernal who was an apothecary who travelled with Columbus on his third voyage to America in 1502. Abraham Nuñez Bernal was burned alive in Cordoba by the Spanish Inquisition in 1654. His brother is supposed to have fled first to Holland and then to England.[20]

However, I have been able to trace JD Bernal back in the direct male line in a genealogical tree that shows nine generations, from father to son, from Shmuel Genese, who was living in the Ghetto in Venice in the late seventeenth century. Their synagogue membership in Venice shows the Genese family were of Italian Jewish (Italkim) origin rather than a family of Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition in Italy.

We have to go back to Bernal’s great-great grandmother, Esther de Abraham Bernal, who married Samuel de Isaac Genese in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. The family in Limerick can be traced through parish records, mainly in Saint Michael’s Church, and through gravestones, including the family graves at the South Porch in Saint Mary’s Cathedral. But tracing the family before it came to Ireland was more difficult. Louis Hyman, says JD Bernal’s ancestors first settled in Waterford, rather than Limerick, and makes no connection with the Genese family, who had businesses in Limerick and Dublin.

So, how did I come across this fascinating family of ancient Jews, with a long lineage, and who moved from Ancona, to Venice, to Amsterdam, to London, to Dublin and to Limerick? They are a family that marries into some of the most eminent Sephardic families of Europe, with names like Lopes, Mendoza, Isaacs, Castro, Tubi, Nunes Martinez, Crespo and Levy.

Admittedly, I came across the family almost by accident. I was interested in two brothers, Henry (Harry) William John Comerford (1874-1958) and Albert (Bert) Alfred George Comerford (1879-1973), who had married two sisters, Rosina Sarah Sipple (1881-1958) and Agnes Violet Sipple (1884-1965). In my genealogical research on the Comerford family, these two brothers almost slipped under the radar. They were involved in stage, theatre, show business and early films at the beginning of the last century, but they used stage names, Harry Ford and Bert Brantford, which disguised their family origins.

Eventually, as I traced their families, I realised that Rosina and Agnes, the two sisters who married these two brothers, were Jewish by birth through their mothers. Although their grandparents were from the heart of the Jewish East End in nineteenth century London, they were descended from a long line of Sephardic families, associated for many generations with the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London.

At some stage in tracing this branch of the family through the East End, Amsterdam and Seville, I also came across the story of Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), once one of the best-known and most celebrated boxers in sporting history on these islands. One hunch led to another, as is so often the case in genealogical research, and within weeks of visiting the Jewish quarter in Seville, I ended up tracing a very long-tailed family with links to Jewish communities throughout Europe.

To summarise the connections: the brothers Harry and Bert Comerford married two sisters, Rosina and Agnes Sipple, who were fourth cousins of Samuel George Bernal of Limerick, father of John Desmond Bernal, and fourth cousins too of Peg Marks (1892-1962), the mother of the actor Peter Sellers (1925-1980).

Inside the Scuola Spagnola in Venice, founded around 1580 by Spanish and Portuguese speaking Jews (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Some conclusions

John Desmond Bernal was one of the most distinguished Irish-born scientists, and had deep family roots in Limerick, where his father Samuel George Bernal (1864-1919) was born, and where his grandfather was a member of the city council.

The story of the Genese family, with their Jewish roots, and their subsequent membership of the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church in Limerick, offers interesting insights into the religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds of people in Limerick that need to be celebrated more consciously in a time when the place of immigrants is questioned and when definitions of Irish identity are in danger of becoming more narrow.

Genealogists should never trust what is too easily regarded as ‘accepted wisdom’. We must always question what is handed on as family story, look for evidence, trust only primary sources, and be willing to look for what other people may hide or forget. The results are rewarding because, in the long run, we find we have the most interesting family connections that make us part of diversity and pluralism not only in Ireland, but throughout Europe.

For too long, telling the story of Limerick’s Jewish community has been overshadowed by what has been called the ‘Limerick Pogrom’.[21] It is a story that must not be forgotten, but, as Des Ryan has pointed out, it is not the only, or overarching story in the history of Limerick Jews. Bernal’s ancestors are an example of the variety of Jewish life in Limerick.

Another example includes Henry Jaffé, who left Limerick in 1904 and was the grandfather of the journalist and popular historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and his brother, the writer and historian Hugh Sebag Montefiore. But their great-great-grandparents, Benjamin and Rachel Jaffe remained in Limerick and were living in Catherine Street in 1911, along with their great-grandparents, Marcus and Leah Jaffe. Or there is Limerick’s last resident rabbi, Simon Gewurtz (1887-1944) from Bratislava, who links the story of Limerick’s Jews with the stories of the Holocaust.

Like other cities in Europe, from Seville, Cordoba and Porto to London, Prague, Bratislava and Krakow, I believe Limerick would be enriched by having a Jewish walking trail, and the story of the Bernal family would be an important part of that route.

The Ponte de Ghetto Vecchio leads into the Campo de Ghetto Nuovo in Venice (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Appendix
The Genese and Bernal family tree

The Genese family in Venice were silk merchants, upholsterers and house furnishers, and were living in the Ghetto Nuovo in Venice from the mid-1600s. A family tradition once proposed that the Genese family were Sephardic refugees who fled to Italy from the Inquisition in Portugal and took their name from Genoa. However, it is now generally accepted by Jewish genealogists that the family had lived in the Italian peninsula for many centuries before they first appear in Venice in the 1640s.

It is now thought the name is derived from the town of San Ginesio, about 60 km south-west of Ancona, where there was a Jewish community with a continuous presence for 2,000 years. The family were members of the Scuola Italiana in Venice, rather than the Spagnola Synagogue. This would indicate clearly that they were descended not from refugees from Spain or Portugal in the late fifteenth century or later but had Italkim (Italian-rite) origins.

Shemuel Ginesi (ca 1650-1703) and his wife, Benvenida (ca 1645-1707), lived in the Ghetto in Venice and were buried in the Jewish Cemetery in the Lido. Their son, Emanuel or Mandolino Ginesi, was a community official in Venice in the first half of the 1700s. His son, David Genese, was living in the Ghetto Nuovo in Venice in September 1739.

David Genese was the father of Isaco or Isaac Genese (Gienese, Ginesi or Guinese), who arrived in London from Italy about 1749, perhaps having first moved to Amsterdam, where there was a large Sephardi community, descended from Spanish, Portuguese and Italian families. This move to London coincides with a time when Italian Jewish families – including the D’Israelis, the Anconas and the Sanguinettis – were arriving in larger numbers and changing the make-up of the Bevis Marks community. Until 1715, the members of the synagogue were almost wholly Spanish refugees or Amsterdam-Spanish migrants, and then from 1715 to 1739 overwhelmingly refugees from Portugal.

A year later, in 1750, Isaac Genese and Sarah de Isaac Lopez were married in the Spanish and Portuguese or Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. They were the parents of six children:

1 a daughter (died in infancy, 1757).
2 Rachel Sarah (died December 1817).
3 David Genese, who married his first cousin Benevenida de Abraham Mendoza, a sister of Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), the celebrated boxer of the Georgian era. David died in 1784, and has no known descendants.
4 Siporah, who married David de Moses Nabaro.
5 Samuel Genese (born 1767) who married Rebecca de Emmanuel Capua in 1790, and they were the parents of eleven children, of whom four died in childhood.
6 Samson de Isaac Genese (born 1769), who married Esther de Abraham Bernal in 1791, a member of a well-known Sephardic family of Spanish descent.

The youngest son, Samson de Isaac Genese (born 1769), married Esther de Abraham Bernal, which is how the Bernal name was introduced to the family. Samson and Esther were the parents of seven children:

1 Isaac Haim Genese (1793-1858), married Esther Jacobs and later moved to Ireland.
2 Rachel (died young).
3 Abraham de Samson Genese (died unmarried, 1859).
4 Samson Genese (junior), married Hannah Simons; they have many living descendants.
5 Samuel Genese (1805-1888), married Rachel Levy (1821-1871); they have many living descendants.
6 Simha.
7 David de Samson Genese (1807-1874), has many living descendants; his son, Joseph de David Genese (born 1851), had eleven children, the youngest born in 1886.

The eldest son, Isaac Haim Genese (1793-1858), married Esther Isaacs in London in 1817. They were the parents of five children, including:

1 Jacob de Isaac Haim Genese, later known as John Bernal (1819-1898).
2 Samuel Genese (born 1820). In 1846, he took over running a snuff and tobacco shop at 34 Grafton Street, Dublin. He married and had at least three children, a son Samson Genese and two daughters, including a daughter Hannah. The two daughters were still running the shop in Grafton Street in 1885. He married Margaret Kelly in Saint Mary’s Church (Church of Ireland), Donnybrook, Dublin, in 1847.
3 Abraham (Bobby) Genese, who died in Limerick in 1847.
4 Rachel Genese (ca 1832-1902); her nephew Samuel Bernal was present at her death at Ormond Quay, Dublin, in 1902.

Isaac Genese was widowed when he moved from London to Ireland with his five surviving children around 1840, and lived in Dublin.[22] He set up an auctioneer’s business and later ran a bookshop and tobacconists. Sometime before 1848, Isaac Genese married his second wife in Dublin, and they had at least two further children:

1 Robert Genese (born 1848).
2 Caroline Genese (1850-1901), who married … Murtagh, and they have descendants.

Isaac Genese’s eldest son, Jacob de Isaac Haim Genese (1819-1898), was born on 29 April 1819. He changed his name to John Bernal, and with his brother Abraham (Bobby) Genese he moved to Limerick in the 1840s. Here they set up a business as auctioneers in Thomas Street and lived in Sexton Street.[23]

When Bobby Genese died in 1847, he was first buried by his brother in a Christian cemetery. But the Jewish community was upset, his body was exhumed, and he was brought to Dublin for burial in the Jewish Cemetery in Ballybough.[24]

Jacob Genese or John Bernal joined the Church of Ireland, and he married Catherine Maria Carroll in Dublin in 1841. They lived at Albert Lodge on Laurel Hill Avenue, Limerick, and he became a successful auctioneer, businessman and active politician in Victorian Limerick as John Bernal. Catherine Bernal, who raised their children as Roman Catholics, died in Limerick on 26 February 1881. Both Maria and John are buried in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, in a raised area beside the south porch.[25]

They were the parents of twelve children, three sons and nine daughters:[26]

1 Catharine (1845-post 1875), married Dr Jeremiah O’Donovan in Dublin, on 24 February 1873.
2 Esther (1846-1875), died in Limerick, aged 29.
3 Dr Robert Arthur Bernal (1850-1876), of Albert Lodge, Laurel Hill Avenue, Limerick, and the Royal Navy. He married Catherine Elizabeth Donnelly (1856-1920) on 18 September 1875, in Dublin. He died 5 October 1876. They were the parents of a daughter, Catherine Elizabeth Mary Frances (Assherson), who was born in Dublin on 14 March 1877. The widowed Catherine (Donnelly) later married: (1) Charles Patrick Magee and (2) Eustatius Louis Emile Brand. She died in Cape Town in 1920.
4 John Theodore Bernal (born 1851).
5 Mary Gertrude (1851-1925), married William Patrick Ryan (1851- ) and they had a large family.
6 Grace (1855-1871), died aged 16.
7 Margaret Josephine (1856-1930) married Thomas John Ryan, later Thomas John Riggs-Miller, of Tyone House, Nenagh, in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick, in 1877.
8 Clara Elizabeth (born ca 1863), married Thomas Greenwood in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick, in 1884.
9 Samuel George Bernal (1864-1919).
10 Aimee Rachel (1866-1937), born Albert Lodge, Limerick, 10 July 1866. She died 11 November 1937. She married Robert Ward in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick, in 1889 and they had a large family.
11 Frances Esther, died 17 March 1894, and buried at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick.
12 Emily, married Albert Pfaff in Saint Michael’s Church, Limerick, in 1889; she died on 28 July 1912.

Albert Lodge was later sold by the Walker family and to the Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ nuns) or Laurel Hill Nuns and became known as Maryville.[27]

Meanwhile, the third son and seventh child in this family, Samuel George Bernal (1864-1919), who was born in Limerick on 22 May 1864, bought a farm in Brookwatson in 1898 and built the family house. On 9 January 1900, he married Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Miller (1869-1951), daughter of the Revd William Young Miller of Illinois, an Irish-born Presbyterian minister. She became a Roman Catholic before they married in 1900. Samuel Bernal died in Nenagh on 18 September 1919.[28]

Samuel and Bessie Bernal were the parents of five children, three sons and two daughters:

1 John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971), born Nenagh 10 May 1910, died in London 15 September 1971.
2 Kevin O’Carroll Diaz Bernal (1903-1996), born Nenagh 22 January 1903, married Margaret Mary Sinnott (1913-1995) and died 17 January 1996.
3 Catherine Elizabeth Geraldine (1906- ), born Nenagh.
4 Fiona Laetitia Evangeline (1908-1908), died at the age of nine weeks.
5 Godfrey Francis Johnston Bernal (1910-2005), born Nenagh, married Ellen Marie Rose McCarthy, died January 2005.

Bevis Marks Synagogue … the principal Sephardic synagogue in London (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Endnotes

1. My research on John Desmond Bernal was first presented at lunchtime lectures in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, on 11 February 2020, and in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, on 18 May 2021 (https://youtu.be/kx0OIY2J4oU)
2. Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, ‘John Desmond Bernal, 10 May 1901 – 15 September 1971,’ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (London: Royal Society, 1980, vol 26, issue 26, pp 16-84), pp 17-18.
3. See Louis Hyman, The Jews of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Year 1910 (Shannon, 1973), p 86.
4. Hodgkin, pp 17-18.
5. Hodgkin, p 21.
6. Hodgkin, p 21-24.
7. Hodgkin, p 25-36; Andrew Brown, JD Bernal – The Sage of Science (Oxford, 2005), pp 90, 146, 187.
8. Hodgkin, pp 36-52.
9. Hodgkin, pp 52-59.
10. See Hodgkin, p 59-60.
11. Hodgkin, pp 60-72.
12. Hodgkin, p 61.
13. Hodgkin, p 72.
14. Hodgkin, p 18.
15. Funeral report, Limerick Chronicle, 22 September 1898; Hodgkin, p 18.
16. Hodgkin, p 17.
17. Jewish Encyclopaedia (1906), vol 3, p 87; Hodgkin, p 17.
18. Hodgkin, p 17.
19. I have constructed this family tree relying on Bevis Marks Records, Vols 1-6 of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation, London (ed Miriam Rodrigues Pereira); and publicly available family trees on ancestry.com; see also: Peter Brunning, ‘Bevis Marks records’, https://www.cantab.net/users/peter.brunning/melhado/bm.html (visited 1 June 2023).
20. Jewish Encyclopaedia (1906), vol 3, p 87.
21. See Des Ryan, ‘Jewish Limerick from 1790 to 1903’, The Old Limerick Journal, Winter edition 2014, pp 44-51; Hyman, pp 210-217.
22. Hyman, p 103, 210.
23. See https://limerickslife.com/constabulary/ (visited 1 June 2023).
24. Hyman, p 103, 210.
25. Gravestones, Saint Mary’s Cathedral; see http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/parker%20rebecca%20sdn.pdf.
26. I have constructed this family tree, relying mainly on parish records in Saint Michael’s Parish, Limerick, the Pro-Cathedral, Dublin; the burial records and gravestones in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick; and publicly available family trees on ancestry.com.
27. See https://limerickslife.com/constabulary/ (visited 1 June 2023).
28. Hodgkin, p 18.

(The Revd Canon Professor) Patrick Comerford was Precentor of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, and priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes (Church of Ireland) until 2022. He has been an adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin, a lecturer in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times. He now lives in retirement in Milton Keynes.

This paper is published in ‘The Old Limerick Journal’, ed Tom Donovan (Limerick: Limerick Museum, ISBN: 9781916294394, 72 pp), No 58, Winter 2023, pp 60-66