William Anderson O'Connor was born in Cork in 1820; his family name was spelt with 2 n's, though in later life he preferred the more traditional Irish spelling of O'Conor.
In his teens he had to leave school because of illness, which seems to have been psychological [schizophrenia or manic depression?] and spent perhaps the best part of a decade living a largely solitary existence at the family’s second home in Kerry, roaming the hills with his gun under his arm and his books in his pocket.
By his late twenties he had recovered sufficiently to attend Trinity College Dublin, but again had to leave, perhaps this time because of family financial difficulties (this would have been during or just after the worst years of the Famine). He moved to St Aidan’s theological college, Birkenhead where he supported himself by acting as a Latin tutor to fellow students. Ordained into the Church of England in 1853 he served as curate in Liverpool and Chester before being appointed Rector of SS Simon & Jude in Granby Row, Manchester in 1858.
Granby Row, now part of the university campus, runs from the main London road, near to Piccadilly railway station, to Upper Brook Street, then an expanding residential area. It was also close to the viaduct of the Liverpool/Manchester railway line & the winding river Medway, & so was partly built up, partly surrounded by waste land, & was gradually being taken over by warehouses. SS Simon & Jude was built in 1842, the first endeavour of the Manchester & Eccles Church Building Society, & was almost directly opposite Manchester’s second oldest, & very fashionable, Roman Catholic church of St Augustine.
Although established for 16 years, the parish to which O'Connor was assigned was not very promising, especially for one of his sensitive & intellectual character. While not a slum area, at least in comparison with the worst the city had to offer, the population of working classes & small shopkeepers did not have the education to appreciate his learned sermons, & in the midst of a heavily Catholic area, O'Connor found that his school was decorated with orange lilies & was a centre of Orangeism. Although an Anglican he was a Liberal & an Irish nationalist, & saw it as his first task to root out these symbols.
All seems to have gone well at first; soon after his appointment he married Charlotte Temple, whose brother was a clergyman, & in 1864 The Builder reported that the church had been improved by the inclusion of new stained glass windows.
But O'Connor was always an eccentric & difficult character & somewhere around this time things seem to have begun to go seriously wrong; the Reverend O'Connor began to see conspiracies all around him, beginning with the alleged insertion in one of the local papers of advertisements accusing him of kleptomania & book-stealing.
The mid-1860s saw increasing anti-Irish hysteria in the press, fuelled by the Fenian activities in Ireland, America & Canada; in Manchester these feelings came to a crisis in 1867 with the rescue of Kelly & Deasy, the murder of Sergeant Brett & the sentencing to death of the Manchester Martyrs; O'Connor played a prominent part in the unsuccessful movement to win a reprieve for the 3 men sentenced to death for the murder of Sergeant Brett.
Somewhere around this time he had also become involved in a fight with his trustees over the control of his parish schools - a fight which he lost. As he saw it, one of his chief enemies was Hugh Birley, a prominent merchant who, in 1868, became conservative MP for Manchester, thus helping finally to break the long hegemony of Liberal Manchester Men; Hugh Birley was probably one of the trustees of his parish since the foundation stone of the church had been laid by his father.
In May 1869 Captain Palin, the Chief Constable of Manchester, was called to an incident at a bookshop involving Reverend O'Connor, who, according to his own later account was then taken to Captain Palin’s office at the Town Hall & left for the rest of the day without food or drink; eventually, after being examined by 2 doctors, he was committed to the county asylum at Prestwich, his wife having refused to commit him to the private asylum at Cheadle. Two days later he was released & went to recuperate at his brother-in-law’s parish in Leeds.
In 1870 O'Connor aired his grievances in a pamphlet which took the form of a letter to Gladstone, revealingly called The Irish Difficulty, in which, among perhaps more paranoid assertions, he claimed that the Manchester constabulary was riddled with Orangemen & was Conservative to a man - a large number of the force were indeed born in the Protestant counties of Ireland. In May 1877 he once more gave a public account of the events of 1869 when he gave evidence before the Select Committee on the Lunacy Laws; he may well have been prompted to give his side of the story by the fact that Hugh Birley was one of the MPs on the committee.
With a difficult parish & no hope of promotion within the church the outlook for O'Connor looked bleak; but he had always had a facility for writing - just before his breakdown in 1869 two of his religious pamphlets - Faith & Works, & Truth & the Church - had been favourably reviewed in The Spectator, and from the mid-1870s he found a much needed outlet in the Manchester Literary Club. Here his critical ability, his learning & his dry sarcastic humour found an appreciative audience; he also became a member of the Manchester Statistical Society to which he contributed papers on his radical views of the economics of Poor Laws, land, & wealth distribution.
His health continued to be fragile, however, and in 1885 he was sent for a time to be chaplain in Rome; he returned to Manchester, still unwell, until near Christmas 1886 'his brain power failed' one day in the street. His wife took him to Torquay, where he died in March 1887 'anxious only that when he was gone his wife would forgive his enemies as fully as he himself had done'. He left no will & his wife - they had no children - was granted administration of his personal estate valued at little over £200.
Postscript
WE Axon edited a posthumous collection of O’Connor’s essays with a view to publishing more if demand was sufficient; no other edition appeared.
SS Simon & Jude was closed & demolished under the Manchester Churches Act of 1906.
The once fashionable St Augustines, whose fabric was being damaged by vibration from machinery in the adjacent Municipal Technology College, was bought, together with its rectory & school, by the Corporation in [1911] for [£30k]; the church moved to All Saints Square further down Oxford Rd.
In his teens he had to leave school because of illness, which seems to have been psychological [schizophrenia or manic depression?] and spent perhaps the best part of a decade living a largely solitary existence at the family’s second home in Kerry, roaming the hills with his gun under his arm and his books in his pocket.
By his late twenties he had recovered sufficiently to attend Trinity College Dublin, but again had to leave, perhaps this time because of family financial difficulties (this would have been during or just after the worst years of the Famine). He moved to St Aidan’s theological college, Birkenhead where he supported himself by acting as a Latin tutor to fellow students. Ordained into the Church of England in 1853 he served as curate in Liverpool and Chester before being appointed Rector of SS Simon & Jude in Granby Row, Manchester in 1858.
Granby Row, now part of the university campus, runs from the main London road, near to Piccadilly railway station, to Upper Brook Street, then an expanding residential area. It was also close to the viaduct of the Liverpool/Manchester railway line & the winding river Medway, & so was partly built up, partly surrounded by waste land, & was gradually being taken over by warehouses. SS Simon & Jude was built in 1842, the first endeavour of the Manchester & Eccles Church Building Society, & was almost directly opposite Manchester’s second oldest, & very fashionable, Roman Catholic church of St Augustine.
Although established for 16 years, the parish to which O'Connor was assigned was not very promising, especially for one of his sensitive & intellectual character. While not a slum area, at least in comparison with the worst the city had to offer, the population of working classes & small shopkeepers did not have the education to appreciate his learned sermons, & in the midst of a heavily Catholic area, O'Connor found that his school was decorated with orange lilies & was a centre of Orangeism. Although an Anglican he was a Liberal & an Irish nationalist, & saw it as his first task to root out these symbols.
All seems to have gone well at first; soon after his appointment he married Charlotte Temple, whose brother was a clergyman, & in 1864 The Builder reported that the church had been improved by the inclusion of new stained glass windows.
But O'Connor was always an eccentric & difficult character & somewhere around this time things seem to have begun to go seriously wrong; the Reverend O'Connor began to see conspiracies all around him, beginning with the alleged insertion in one of the local papers of advertisements accusing him of kleptomania & book-stealing.
The mid-1860s saw increasing anti-Irish hysteria in the press, fuelled by the Fenian activities in Ireland, America & Canada; in Manchester these feelings came to a crisis in 1867 with the rescue of Kelly & Deasy, the murder of Sergeant Brett & the sentencing to death of the Manchester Martyrs; O'Connor played a prominent part in the unsuccessful movement to win a reprieve for the 3 men sentenced to death for the murder of Sergeant Brett.
Somewhere around this time he had also become involved in a fight with his trustees over the control of his parish schools - a fight which he lost. As he saw it, one of his chief enemies was Hugh Birley, a prominent merchant who, in 1868, became conservative MP for Manchester, thus helping finally to break the long hegemony of Liberal Manchester Men; Hugh Birley was probably one of the trustees of his parish since the foundation stone of the church had been laid by his father.
In May 1869 Captain Palin, the Chief Constable of Manchester, was called to an incident at a bookshop involving Reverend O'Connor, who, according to his own later account was then taken to Captain Palin’s office at the Town Hall & left for the rest of the day without food or drink; eventually, after being examined by 2 doctors, he was committed to the county asylum at Prestwich, his wife having refused to commit him to the private asylum at Cheadle. Two days later he was released & went to recuperate at his brother-in-law’s parish in Leeds.
In 1870 O'Connor aired his grievances in a pamphlet which took the form of a letter to Gladstone, revealingly called The Irish Difficulty, in which, among perhaps more paranoid assertions, he claimed that the Manchester constabulary was riddled with Orangemen & was Conservative to a man - a large number of the force were indeed born in the Protestant counties of Ireland. In May 1877 he once more gave a public account of the events of 1869 when he gave evidence before the Select Committee on the Lunacy Laws; he may well have been prompted to give his side of the story by the fact that Hugh Birley was one of the MPs on the committee.
With a difficult parish & no hope of promotion within the church the outlook for O'Connor looked bleak; but he had always had a facility for writing - just before his breakdown in 1869 two of his religious pamphlets - Faith & Works, & Truth & the Church - had been favourably reviewed in The Spectator, and from the mid-1870s he found a much needed outlet in the Manchester Literary Club. Here his critical ability, his learning & his dry sarcastic humour found an appreciative audience; he also became a member of the Manchester Statistical Society to which he contributed papers on his radical views of the economics of Poor Laws, land, & wealth distribution.
His health continued to be fragile, however, and in 1885 he was sent for a time to be chaplain in Rome; he returned to Manchester, still unwell, until near Christmas 1886 'his brain power failed' one day in the street. His wife took him to Torquay, where he died in March 1887 'anxious only that when he was gone his wife would forgive his enemies as fully as he himself had done'. He left no will & his wife - they had no children - was granted administration of his personal estate valued at little over £200.
Postscript
WE Axon edited a posthumous collection of O’Connor’s essays with a view to publishing more if demand was sufficient; no other edition appeared.
SS Simon & Jude was closed & demolished under the Manchester Churches Act of 1906.
The once fashionable St Augustines, whose fabric was being damaged by vibration from machinery in the adjacent Municipal Technology College, was bought, together with its rectory & school, by the Corporation in [1911] for [£30k]; the church moved to All Saints Square further down Oxford Rd.
Links
Faith and works, William Anderson O'Conor, Download - Barnes & Noble
NATIONAL EDUCATION UNION. /3, Chairman: Hugh Birley, Esq., M.P. ...
Related post
