Charles Kickham

Tomorrow, 6 February marks the 107th anniversary of the first showing of the silent film version of Charles Kickham’s, Knocknagow [to watch see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A-R9F6OqXs ]. Set in county Tipperary, Kickham’s work was influential during the revolutionary period and he himself had been a Fenian. In 1933 Mrs Sigerson Piatt, one of the last remaining writers who knew Kickham provided readers of the newspaper with her memories of the fiery Fenian:

I HAVE many clear pictures of Charles Kickham in my mind from those far-off days when, as a child, I saw him often. In one, the earliest, I am trying to keep up with his great strides with a trotting of short legs down the Rathmines road. Some other grown-up person is in the company, probably my father (Dr. George Sigerson). Of the conversation I unfortunately remember nothing. I do remember, however, how Charles Kickham looked and dressed : his hair, curling and grey, grew down on his forehead in a peak, and his blue, faint-seeing eyes twinkled humorously through his spectacles. Over his shoulder he carried an umbrella, like a gun, and he wore a grey frieze-coat and a soft hat pushed back on his head. Children, Women and Fires.

That must have been when we lived in Rathmines. Later when we moved to Dublin (3 Clare Street), there are many more memories. He was a great lover of children and delighted in their company. (He told Rose Kavanagh once that what he most missed in prison was children, women and fires.) It is because of this, no doubt, that I remember him so well. He used to tell us little stories and make jokes for us mother and sometimes with Rose Kavanagh, the young poet and journalist from Tyrone. She it was who edited the United Irishman when O'Connor was imprisoned for sedition. I remember how she looked as she bent forward over his outstretched hand, her eager, expressive grey eyes, her burnished auburn hair brushed back from her low forehead, her wild-rose colouring. To her Kickham wrote a poem called "The Rose of Knockmany." She died of consumption in 1890. I think my last memory of Kickham is seeing Rose and himself walking up and down the path of the long garden at the back of a Monkstown house while I played with the O'Connor children. It was when walking in this garden that he got the stroke from which he died the following day, August 22, 1882. His last words were: "Let it be known that I die in the Catholic faith, and that I die loving Ireland and I only wish I could have done

John O'Leary, in after days, used often to talk of Kickham (whom he loved as did all his other friends) and laugh, in his kindly way, at this sobriquet, " the gentle Charles," for it seemed that Kickham had been fierce enough as a Fenian. No doubt, like the ideal warrior of Finn's advice to his grandson, he kept in hall a courteous-mood, though in brunt of battle rude." That he, too, like the hero's model, was gentle with women and children I know from my own memories of the past.

When Charles Kickham wrote his most popular novel " Knocknagow " he dedicated it to his two little nieces Annie and Josie Cleary. It is my great privilege to have as a correspondent the elder of these two nieces, now Mrs. Florence Kickham White, of Riverside, Connecticut, who lately sent me an interesting letter in reply to one of mine asking for memories of her Uncle Charles:

Owing to reverses in my father's business he (my father came to America in "64," she says, "and my mother and Josie, Fannie and I went to live in Mullinahone. In the same year, my mother with Fannie, who was a few months old, came to America, under Uncle Charles' care, to join ray father. Uncle Charles' arrest and imprisonment followed soon after his return to Ireland. As you can imagine we were brought up filled with adoration for him and devotion to the cause for which he suffered….

For more information search the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive (www.irishnewsarchive.com )