Birth name | Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Date of birth | 27 February 1885 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Place of birth | Dublin, Ireland | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Date of death | 11 September 1965 80) | (aged||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Place of death | Wandsworth, England | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
School | St. Andrews College, Dublin | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
University | Trinity College, Dublin | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Occupation(s) | Doctor | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rugby union career | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons (27 February 1885 – 11 September 1965), [1] [2] born into a prominent Jewish family, was an Irish medical doctor and an international rugby player for Ireland and supporter of the 1916 Rising.
Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons born in Dublin, Ireland, to a prominent Jewish family, one of the oldest continuous Jewish families in Ireland. The Solomons came over to Ireland from England in 1824. Bethel Solomons was the son of Maurice Solomons (1832–1922), an optician whose practice is mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses. [nb 1] His grandmother Rosa Jacobs Solomons (1833–1926) was born in Hull in England.
Bethel's elder brother Edwin (1879–1964) was a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. His sister Estella Solomons (1882–1968) was a leading artist, and a member of Cumann na mBan during the 1916 rising; she married poet and publisher Seamus O'Sullivan. [4] His younger sister Sophie was a trained opera singer.
Solomons attended St. Andrews School in Dublin where he was very interested in rugby; He earned 10 international rugby caps for Ireland (1908–1910). [5]
He studied medicine in Trinity College, Dublin, [2] became a medical doctor, and was Master of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin from 1926 to 1933. This is mentioned in Finnegans Wake in my bethel of Solyman's I accouched my rotundaties. He served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) in the late 1940s and he practiced from No. 30 Lr. Baggot Street.
In a biography of Solomons he was described as "World famous obstetrician & gynaecologist, Rugby international, horseman, leader of Liberal Jewry & of Irish literary & artistic renaissance." [6]
He married Gertrude Levy in the liberal synagogue in London in 1916.[ citation needed ] His second son, Dr Michael Solomons (1919–2007) was a distinguished gynaecologist, a pioneer of family planning in Ireland, and a veteran of the bitter and divisive 1983 constitutional amendment campaign. [7]
He was a friend of the founder of Sinn Féin and TD, Arthur Griffith.[ citation needed ] Solomons contributed to the purchase of a house for Griffith. Solomons was a founding member and the first president of the Liberal Synagogue in Dublin.[ citation needed ]
Solomon was an art collector, including the works of Jean Cooke. [8]
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Arthur Joseph Griffith was an Irish writer, newspaper editor and politician who founded the political party Sinn Féin. He led the Irish delegation at the negotiations that produced the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and served as the president of Dáil Éireann from January 1922 until his death later in August.
Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place on a Thursday in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
Terenure, originally called Roundtown, is a middle class suburb of Dublin in Ireland. It is located in the city's D6 and D6W postal districts. The population of all electoral divisions labelled as Terenure was 17,972 as of the 2022 census.
Clongowes Wood College SJ is a Catholic voluntary boarding school for boys near Clane, County Kildare, Ireland, founded by the Jesuits in 1814. It features prominently in James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. One of five Jesuit secondary schools in Ireland, it had 450 students in 2019.
Belvedere College S.J. is a fee-paying voluntary secondary school for boys in Dublin, Ireland.
Portobello is an area of Dublin in Ireland, within the southern city centre and bounded to the south by the Grand Canal. It came into existence as a small suburb south of the city in the 18th century, centred on Richmond Street.
The history of the Jews in Ireland extends for more than a millennium. The Jewish community in Ireland has always been small in numbers in modern history, not exceeding 5,500 since at least 1891.
Events from the year 1885 in Ireland.
The 1908 Home Nations Championship was the twenty-sixth series of the rugby union Home Nations Championship. Six matches were played between 18 January and 21 March. It was contested by England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Griffith Barracks is a former military barracks on the South Circular Road, Dublin, Ireland.
Estella Francis Solomons was one of the leading Irish artists of her generation. She came from a prominent Dublin Jewish family. She studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. She was a member of Cumann na mBan and was active during the revolutionary period. She was noted for her portraits of contemporaries in the republican movement and her studio was a safe house during the War of Independence. She married poet Seumas O'Sullivan, founder of The Dublin Magazine, and helped to support it financially. The couple hosted regular salons in their home which attracted Irish artists, writers, politicians and intellectuals. Solomons was a close friend of writer Kathleen Goodfellow, whom she met in Cumann na mBan and who was a patron of The Dublin Magazine. Solomons was elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1966, having been an associate since 1925.
Parkmore RFC is an Irish rugby team based in Terenure, Dublin. They play in the Leinster Metro League.
Dr. Cecil Anderson Boyd MC was an Irish rugby union player, and medical doctor. Boyd played international rugby for Ireland and in 1896 was chosen to represent a British Isles XV in their tour of South Africa. Boyd was the second son of Sir Walter Boyd, 1st Baronet, and although the title passed to Boyd's older brother, Boyd's son became the third Boyd Baronet, of Howth House
Edwin Maurice Solomons was a prominent figure in Irish Jewry and international business. He was the first member of the Dublin stock exchange.
St Andrew's College Dublin is a co-educational, inter-denominational, international Private day school, founded in 1894 by members of the Presbyterian community, and now located in Booterstown, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Ireland. The school colours are blue and white.
Dolphins Barn Jewish Cemetery was established in 1898 by Robert Bradlaw a dentist and prominent member of Dublin's Jewish community who raised £300 in donations to set up a new chevra kadisha. and the Dublin Jewish Holy Burial Society (HBS), founded in 1884 and dedicated to financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. It replaced Ballybough Cemetery, Fairview, as the principal Jewish cemetery in Dublin, and close to the south circular road area, where a large number of jews lived. There is also a prayer room on the site. With Dolphins barn being the Orthodox cemetery, there is also a Progressive Jewish Cemetery, Woodtown Cemetery, on Oldcourt Road, Rathfarnham, established in 1952.