Home Rule

Frank Hugh O'Donnell

About: 

Frank Hugh O’Donnell was an Irish politician and journalist, known as a fierce opponent of British imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. He was born Francis Hugh MacDonald at a barracks in Devon to a sergeant in the British Army. He was educated in Galway at a Jesuit high school and then at Queen’s College, where he rapidly earned a reputation as an orator and controversialist.

In 1874 he was elected Member of Parliament for Galway but, in a judgment probably influenced by political bias, was convicted of electoral malpractice and removed from office. Undeterred, he returned to the Commons three years later as Member for Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, and held that seat until its abolition in 1885. A provocative and popular figure within the Home Rule League, he served the party with champion filibustering and in 1888 he launched the historic libel action against The Times which led to C. S. Parnell’s exoneration from conspiracy in the Phoenix Park Murders.

In Parliament he often spoke on British imperialism in India in analogy with Irish matters. He received a schooling in Indian nationalism from his friend G. M. Tagore, with whom he, J.C. Meenakshya and four other Irish MPs joined in 1875 to form the Constitutional Society of India. Further information was gleaned from his brother Charles J. O’Donnell, an civil servant in Bihar who earned the nickname ‘the enfant terrible of the ICS’ for his public criticism and exposure of government policy. In 1882 he told Parliament that the Irish Party were ‘the natural representatives and spokesmen for the unrepresented nationalities of the empire’ and in 1883 he threw his weight behind a premature campaign to have Dadabhai Naoroji elected to Parliament. In 1905 he sent a message of support to Shyamji Krishnavarma upon his inauguration of India House.

Defeated by Parnell in his bid for the party leadership, O'Donnell abandoned parliamentary politics and, after joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians), pursued a chequered career of furious pamphleteering. During the Boer War he secured funds from the Transvaal Government to militate against Irish enlistment, but he was later accused of pocketing the money and condemned by the United Irishman. He spent much of his later career campaigning for secular and mixed education in a series of determined sallies against the political might of the Catholic clergy. He died unmarried at London, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Published works: 

Souls for Gold (1901)

Paraguay on Shannon (1908)

A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 2 vols (1910)

Date of birth: 
09 Oct 1846
Connections: 

Maud Gonne, Shyamji Krishnavarma, J. C. Meenakshya, Dadabhai Naoroji, T. P. O’Connor, Charles J. O’Donnell, Charles Stewart Parnell, G. M. Tagore, Alfred Webb, W. B. Yeats.

Secondary works: 

Jeffery, Keith, An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (Pluto Press, London, 2002)

City of birth: 
Devonport, Devon
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Francis Hugh O'Donnell

Date of death: 
02 Nov 1916
Location of death: 
London, England
Tags for Making Britain: 

George Arundale

About: 

George Arundale was a Theosophist. He was tutored by Charles Leadbeater and went to St John's College, Cambridge in 1895. In 1902, he moved to Benares and became principal of the Central Hindu College. Arundale became involved with the All-India Home Rule League and was imprisoned, with Annie Besant, in 1917, under the Defence of India Act, 1917.

In 1920, he married a Brahmin girl, Rukmini Devi, which caused some controversy in India. In 1926, he became Regionary Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church in India. In 1934, he became President of the Theosophical Society. He edited the Theosophist. He died in 1945 in Adyar at the Theosophist headquarters.

Published works: 

Various works on theosophy include:

Bedrock of Education (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1924)

Thoughts of the Great (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1924)

You (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1935)

Gods in the Becoming (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1936)

Education for Happiness (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1938)

Adventures in Theosophy (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1941)

Date of birth: 
01 Dec 1878
Connections: 
Secondary works: 

Dixon, Joy, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (London: John Hopins, 2001)

Lutyens, Mary, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (London: John Murray, 1975)

Lutyens, Mary, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (London: John Murray, 1990)

Meduri, Avanthi (ed.), Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1968): A Visionary Architect of Indian culture and the Performing Arts (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005)

Archive source: 

Theosophical Archives, Adyar, India

City of birth: 
Wonersh, Surrey
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

George Sydney Arundale

Date of death: 
12 Aug 1945
Location of death: 
Adyar, India
Tags for Making Britain: 

Annie Besant

About: 

Annie Besant was a leading member of the Theosophical Society, a feminist and political activist, and a politician in India. She had a close relationship with Charles Bradlaugh, MP, a free-thinker who was often known as the 'Member for India'. Having declared herself an atheist, Annie Besant was drawn to other ideas of spiritualism and joined the Theosophical Society in 1889. She was very close to the co-founder, Madame Blavatsky, and allowed Blavatksy to live in her house in St John's Wood from 1889. In 1907, after the death of Colonel Olcott, Besant was made President of the Theosophical Society.

In 1911, Besant brought Jiddu Krishnamurti and his brother to England and acted as their guardian. She proclaimed in 1927 that Krishnamurti was the 'coming', i.e., messiah, and was devastated when he left the Theosophical Society in 1929.  

Besant also campaigned for the rights of Indians and for Indian 'home rule'. She launched the Home Rule League in 1916, modelling the Indian plight on that of Ireland. She was a member of the Fabian Society, owing to her close relationship with George Bernard Shaw. In 1917 she became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress at a session in Calcutta.

Published works: 

Why I Became a Theosophist (London: Freethought Publishing, 1889) 

An Autobiography (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893)

The Bhagavad Gita (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1895)

The Case for India [Congress Presidential Address, December 1917] (London: Home Rule for India League, 1918)

Date of birth: 
01 Oct 1847
Contributions to periodicals: 

Lucifer (edited September 1889 to 1909)

The Theosophical Review (edited 1897-1909)

Reviews: 

The Manchester Guardian, 6 August 1895 (Bhagvad-Gita)

Western Mail (Cardiff), 6 August 1895

Liverpool Mercury, 28 August 1895

For articles relating to Annie Besant, see: 'A Talk with Mrs Annie Besant', Christian World, 12 April 1894, p. 259; 'The New Messiah', The Spectator, 26 June 1926

Secondary works: 

Bright, Esther, Old Memories and Letters of Annie Besant (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1936)

Nethercott, Arthur, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963)

Taylor, Anne, ‘Besant , Annie (1847-1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30735]

Broughton, T. L. , 'Women's Autobiography: The Self at Stake?', Prose Studies 14 (September 1991), pp. 76-94

Archive source: 

Women's Library, London Metropolitan University, London

Theosophical Society Archives, Adyar, India

Letters to Annie Besant, 1914-1926, Mss Eur C888, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

Theosophical Society in England, London

College of Psychic Studies, South Kensington

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Date of death: 
20 Sep 1933
Location of death: 
Adyar, India
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