John Boyle O'Reilly (; 28 June 1844 – 10 August 1890) was an Irish poet, journalist, author and activist. As a youth in Ireland, he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians, for which he was transported to Western Australia.

After escaping to the United States, he became a prominent spokesperson for the Irish diaspora community and culture through his editorship of the Boston newspaper The Pilot, in addition to his personal writings and lecture tours.

Born in Dowth, County Meath, O'Reilly moved to his aunt's residence in England as a teenager and became involved in journalism before enlisting in the British Army shortly thereafter. In 1863, he left the army after becoming discontented with British rule in Ireland.

In 1864, after returning to Ireland, O'Reilly joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood under an assumed name and was part of the group for two years until he and many others were arrested by the British authorities in early 1866.

O'Reilly's literature and involvement in civil rights causes have been celebrated over the years.

Early life

O'Reilly was born on 28 June 1844 at Dowth Castle to William David O'Reilly (1808–1871) and Eliza O'Reilly (née Boyle) (1815–1868) along with 61 other Fenian prisoners and 218 common criminals, for transportation to the British colony of Western Australia.

Midway through the voyage, O'Reilly and another prisoner John Flood, established a handwritten newspaper called The Wild Goose which contained poetry, stories and anecdotes from members of the ship's convict fraternity. Seven editions were produced, and the single copy of the original set survives and is held in the State Library of New South Wales collection. The Hougoumonts passage was the last convict ship transport to Western Australia.

thumb|News clipping from the [[The West Australian|Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 17 January 1868, announcing the arrival of the Hougoumont in Fremantle ]]

After arriving in Fremantle on 9 January 1868, O'Reilly was admitted to the Convict Establishment (now Fremantle Prison), but after a month he was transferred to Bunbury. He was assigned to a party of convicts tasked with building the Bunbury–Busselton road.

O'Reilly quickly developed a good relationship with his warder Henry Woodman, and was appointed probationary convict constable. As assistant to the warder, he did record and account keeping, ordering of stores, and other minor administrative duties. He was frequently used as a messenger, which required him to travel regularly between the work camp and the district convict prison in Bunbury. The warder apparently used O'Reilly to maintain contact with his family, for the prisoner became a regular visitor to the Woodman family home, and at some point he began a romantic liaison with Woodman's daughter Jessie. This ended badly, at least for O'Reilly; he wrote poetry expressing his agony of mind, and hints at romantic causes. On 27 December 1868 O'Reilly attempted suicide by cutting the veins of his left arm. After falling into a faint from loss of blood, he was discovered by another convict, and his life was saved.

According to a letter discovered in 2015, Jessie Woodman became pregnant with O'Reilly's child (this has been said to be a factor in O'Reilly's suicide attempt). Most accounts say that Woodman had the child after O'Reilly escaped and it died shortly after. Woodman's father Henry eventually found out about the relationship and married Jessie off to local 22-year-old George Pickersgill in March 1869. (O'Reilly was either still hiding from authorities or on his way to America during this time.)

O'Reilly hid in the dunes, awaiting the departure from Bunbury of the American whaling ship Vigilant which Father McCabe had arranged would take him on board. The ship was sighted the next day, and the party rowed out to it, but the captain reneged on the agreement, and the Vigilant sailed off without acknowledging the people in the rowboat. O'Reilly had to return to the shore and hide again while his friends tried to make arrangements with another ship. After two weeks, they succeeded in making a deal with the captain of the American whaler . O'Reilly and his friends met the Gazelle out to sea on 2 March, and he was taken on board. With him was a ticket of leave convict named Martin Bowman (alias for Thomas Henderson),

Athletics

O'Reilly was an amateur boxer and also competed in fencing, rowing, canoeing, and hurling. In 1879, he helped found the Irish Athletic Club of Boston, which held annual hurling competitions. In 1888, his Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport was published.

O'Reilly advocated for the creating a social club similar to the New York Athletic Club in Boston. In January 1887, a meeting was held to discuss his proposal and O'Reilly and fifteen others were appointed to a committee to investigate the feasibility of such an organization. The committee reported favorably and the Boston Athletic Association was officially organized on March 15, 1887, with O'Reilly elected to its governing committee.

Death

On August 9, 1890, O'Reilly took an early boat to his residence in Hull, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from bouts of insomnia during this time. That evening he took a long walk with his brother-in-law John R. Murphy hoping that physical fatigue would induce the needed sleep.

Later on that night he took some of his wife's sleeping medicine, which contained chloral hydrate.

On the morning of 10 August around 2 to 3 a.m. his wife woke up and found O'Reilly sitting in a chair, with one hand resting on the table near a book, and a cigar in the other. O'Reilly was found to be unconscious. His wife sent a servant for the family's physician Dr Litchfield, He spent nearly an hour trying to revive him, but O'Reilly died shortly before 5 a.m. Public announcements attributed O'Reilly's death to heart failure, but the official death register claims "accidental poisoning".

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File:John Boyle O'Reilly Tombstone Holyhood Cemetery Brookline Massachusetts USA.jpg|John Boyle O'Reilly Tombstone Holyhood Cemetery Brookline Massachusetts USA

File:John Boyle O'Reilly Tombstone Plaque Close-up Holyhood Cemetery Brookline Massachusetts USA.jpg|John Boyle O'Reilly Tombstone Plaque Close-up Holyhood Cemetery Brookline Massachusetts USA

File:John Boyle O'Reilly Plaque Charlestown.jpg|The John Boyle O'Reilly Plaque is one of several honoring past prominent residents of Charlestown Massachusetts. It is located in City Square Park.

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Grief and tributes

O'Reilly's sudden death received an outpouring of grief and tributes from the Boston community and also globally, The Pilot published a full biography of his life in their 16 August edition. Cardinal James Gibbons said upon hearing the news, On 20 June 1896 (nearly a week before what would have been his 52nd birthday), a multi-figure bronze sculpture of O'Reilly was unveiled, then-President Grover Cleveland gave a speech at the event. thumb|right|John Boyle O'Reilly monument, Boston, by [[Daniel Chester French, 1896]]

O'Reilly's admirers included poets and politicians such as Walt Whitman, James Whitcomb Riley, Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy, Grover Cleveland

Author and historian Francis Russell included an essay about O'Reilly in his 1987 book "The Knave of Boston & Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters". Russell described how O'Reilly had gone from being perhaps the most famous Irishman in American in the late 1800s to a largely "forgotten poet" a century later.

Around the mid-1980s, Irish researcher Liam Barry (based in Bunbury) discovered the story of O'Reilly's escape and began to research more into it and promote the story. Before his death in 2015 he published multiple books on O'Reilly and the Fenians.

Around 1987 The John Boyle O'Reilly Association of Bunbury, Western Australia was founded, Barry was one of the founding members.

In 2002 an interpretative display was opened for John Boyle O'Reilly, in Western Australia on the Leschenault Peninsula Conservation Park, from where he escaped to the United States.

In April 2011 The John Boyle O'Reilly Association was established in Netterville his ancestral home, near Drogheda, Ireland.

J.B. O'Reilly's pub in West Leederville, Western Australia is named after O'Reilly.

In 2019, a festival was held in Fremantle to commemorate the 150th anniversary of O'Reilly's escape titled the Moondyne Walk, where a series of different readers would read out a chapter of his 1879 novel Moondyne. The list of readers included former Western Australian premier Peter Dowding, epidemiologist Fiona Stanley, author and journalist Peter FitzSimons and actor Peter Rowsthorn.

Pardon request

In 1999 then-Western Australian opposition leader, Geoff Gallop, made an unsuccessful request to British Prime Minister and friend Tony Blair to grant O'Reilly a pardon.

Works

  • Songs from the Southern Seas (1873) – a collection of poems
  • Songs, Legends and Ballads (1878) – a collection of poems
  • Moondyne (1879) – a novel based on his experiences as a convict in Western Australia
  • The Statues in the Block (1881) – a collection of poems
  • In Bohemia (1886) – a collection of poems
  • The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888) – a treatise on health and physical exercise, later republished as Athletics and Manly Sport
  • Watchwords (1891) – released posthumously and was edited by Katherine E. Conway.
  • Selected poems of John Boyle O'Reilly (1904)
  • O'Reilly is said to have been U.S. President John F. Kennedy's favourite poet.
  • In 1913 Melbourne-based silent film company Lincoln-Cass Film Company produced Moondyne, a silent film based on O'Reilly's novel. It was released in September 1913.
  • The song "Van Diemen's Land" on U2's Rattle and Hum (1988) album refers to and is dedicated to O'Reilly.
  • The county Clare folk singer Sean Tyrrell has set a number of O'Reilly's poems to music. A trilogy was included on his 1994 album, Cry of a Dreamer.
  • The musician and local historian Brendan Woods wrote The Catalpa, a play about the 1876 escape from Fremantle Prison. It premiered on 15 November 2006 to a sell-out audience at Fremantle Town Hall and ran until 25 November. The play was based on the diaries of Denis Cashman, with the poetry of John Boyle O'Reilly set to music and dance, supported by a five-part musical ensemble.
  • Woods released a CD entitled: John Boyle O'Reilly & The Fenian Escape from Fremantle Gaol (2006).
  • In 2016, the John Boyle O'Reilly Association of Bunbury made a short film based on O'Reilly's time waiting for the Vigilant to arrive titled In Search of the Vigilant. It was filmed in the Leschenault Peninsula and other parts of the Bunbury area. The 30-minute short film premiered in Bunbury on March 25, 2017.
  • In 2017 Western Australian musician Latehorse (Shane Thomas) released a song about O'Reilly's escape titled A Dreamer Forever
  • O'Reilly is featured as one of the main characters in the musical drama Toilers of the Sea: The Life of Joshua James.
  • O'Reilly's mugshot is one of eight convicts featured on wine bottle labels for the Australian wine brand 19 Crimes.

See also

  • List of convicts transported to Australia

Notes

References

General references

Further reading

  • Works of John Boyle O'Reilly in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)