Sheila Turner Johnston: Alice: A Life of Alice Milligan (1994; repr. 2009)

This was the first biographical work on Alice Milligan, whom I came across recently when discovering about her brother Ernest (post immediately below), the ground-breaking doctor who lived in Glossop for thirty-four years. In fact Alice, with her brother William, lived in Glossop with Ernest and his family for almost ten years from 1922 to about 1932, but that's not the subject here.

Alice was an Irish nationalist, born in Omagh, who was a poet and novelist who came from a large family of siblings, including Charlotte, a sister who wrote songs and unearthed old folk songs. Her father Seaton was a businessman who was also a local historian and archaeologist.

One of the almost forgotten women who were a part of Irish politics and literary history, Alice Milligan published a number of books and was a friend of W. B. Yeats and Roger Casement, for instance. Although she never actually met the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell she was heavily influenced by him, angry with the Irish people's condemnation of him for his affair with the married Kitty O'Shea, and deeply affected by his death.

Alice never married, although it's unknown if she had any love affairs. She wanted to speak Irish, not the language of imperialism, although she never got anywhere near to mastering the language. Although she was relatively well-known in Ireland, her brother Ernest (who nevertheless wanted a biography written on her after her death), didn't appear to have any knowledge of her status while she was living.

Unfortunately, fascinating though it is to learn of Alice Milligan's life, Sheila Johnston, in spite of the undoubtedly painstaking efforts she has taken researching her subject, is manifestly not a professional researcher: there is a smack of the undergraduate project here (although Johnston is far from young), and I winced in a few places. Nevertheless, Johnston has put Milligan on the map, and I have since noted that Catherine Morris has followed up with the more scholarly Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revolution (2012).

Dr Ernest Henry Marcus Milligan in Glossop, Derbyshire

'IN

LOVING

MEMORY

OF

A DEAR HUSBAND AND FATHER

ERNEST H. M. MILLIGAN

WHO DIED 21ST MARCH 1954, AGED 75 YEARS.

FOR 26 YEARS M.O.H. FOR GLOSSOP

FEAR NOT MORE THE HEAT O' THE SUN

NOR THE FURIOUS WINTER'S RAGES;

THOU THY WORLDLY TASK HAST DONE

AND HIS BELOVED WIFE SARAH

BORN 17TH JAN 1883 DIED 19TH JAN 1961.'

Ernest Henry Marcus Milligan (1879–1954) was an Irish Protestant from Belfast who became the first medical officer of health in Glossop, Derbyshire. He lived at Daisy Bank in nearby Hadfield, and according to his obituary in the Glossop Chronicle of 26 March 1954 he began a 'health revolution in the town, a health revolution that has gone on ever since' when he moved to Glossop in 1920. He had a great interest in the nutrition of school children, and provided considerable details on them. He is perhaps best known for his peanuts and whey toffee.

Milligan wrote a book of poems in 1907: Up Bye Ballads, published under the pseudonym of 'Will Carew'. Many years later he wrote several plays – some in collaboration with his solicitor son-in-law A. V. Williams – which were broadcast on the radio in Manchester, such as: The Ballad Singer (1933), Muggleston on the Map: A Municipal Mockery (1934), The Mayor Chooses a Wife (1935), and 'Twas in Old Ireland – Somewhere (1936).

Milligan came from a highly talented family, and his most famous sibling is Alice Milligan (1865-1953), the Irish Nationalist, poet and novelist. He wanted the Irish Republican W. P. Allen to write her biography, but this was not to be. However, in 1994 Sheila Turner Johnston published a short biography of Alice, which was re-published in 2009. And for a more academic angle, there's now Catherine Morris's Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revolution (2012).