Page 70 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

IT IS THE HOME RULE BILL THAT HAS DONE THAT

There were also connections between some of the Wicklow
signatories and prominent Unionist and Ulster political figures:
Sidney Blanche Moore’s son, William Moore, a barrister, was
currently MP for North Armagh, and would ultimately be
appointed the first Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, while
Isabella D’Alton’s brother, Wood Gibson Jefferson, also a
barrister, was ‘an uncompromising Unionist’ and party activist in
Dublin, prior to his sudden death just a couple of weeks before
41
Ulster Day. Louisa Meriel Head of Thornhill, Bray, who signed
at Hillsborough, Co Down, was related by marriage to Edward
42
Saunderson MP, former leader of the Irish Unionist Party ;
Conolly Thomas McCausland, husband of Laura and father of
Octavia and Lettice McCausland, was adamantly opposed to the
first home rule measures and a leading light in the Ulster
Defence Union, while his son, Maurice, was involved in the Larne
gunrunning and hosted a rally in 1914 on his estate, Drenagh,
near Limavady, at which Edward Carson inspected 4,000 men
of the North Derry contingent of the UVF. Laura herself had
established the Limavady branch of the Women’s Unionist
Association, which at its first meeting unanimously condemned
the 1893 bill as ‘subversive of all the best interests of this
country’, and vowed to ‘thwart the designs of selfish and wicked
43
men.’
Florence and Gwendoline Lindsay, originally from
Portadown, were the nieces of Richard Best, MP for Armagh and
Attorney General for Northern Ireland, 1921-25 and Lord Justice
of Appeal, 1925-39; their brother, Frederick, who signed the
Covenant in Waterford while a teacher at Bishop Foy’s School
there, went on to teach Louis McNeice at Sherborne Preparatory

41 Northern Whig, 10 September 1912. Wood Gibson Jefferson died on 8
September 1912.
42 Louisa Head’s brother was married to Edward Saunderson’s daughter.
43 Macrory, One family, pp 33, 46-47.
66