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History of Tara Hall

A brief history of Tara Hall

William Monk Gibbon and Tara Hall

William Monk Gibbon was born in 1896. Poet, author and occasional travel writer he was educated at St. Columba’s College, Rathfarnham and Keble College, Oxford.

He fought in World War 1 from 1914 to 1918 when he was invalided out, spent time in Jersey doing a government farming course and then taught English and horse-riding for twelve years at a school in Dorset before returning to his native Dublin. Tara Hall was his family home from 1953 until his death in 1985. His published works include; autobiographical novels ‘The Inglorious Soldier’, telling of his time in the army, ‘Brahm’s Waltz’ telling of life in Jersey and ‘The Pupil’ of teaching in Dorset; travel guides of Switzerland, Austria and Germany; ballet, film and literary criticism and several collections of poems.

Monk Gibbon seems to have been quite a character among the literary circles of Dublin. Yeats (to whom Monk Gibbon was related) is quoted as saying “(William Monk Gibbon) is one of the three people in Dublin whom I dislike............ because he is argumentative!”

Monk Gibbon's works include: -
* The Branch of Hawthorn Tree (1927)
* The Seals (1935) autobiography
* The Living Torch (1937) poems by AE, editor
* Mount Ida (1948)
* This Insubstantial Pageant (1951)
* The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as I Knew Him (1959) biography
* The Climate of Love (1961)
* Inglorious Soldier (1968) memoir
* The Brahms Waltz (1970)
* The Velvet Bow (1972)
* The Pupil (1981)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW and TARA HALL

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856. He is the only person ever to have won both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize for literature. He won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for My Fair Lady (the film version of his book Pygmalion) in 1938.

As a child, he attended his first school, the Wesleyan Connexional, in St. Stephen’s Green in 1865 but, after only three months, according to the roll books, he was taken away and did not return there until August 1867. During this interval he attended a preparatory school at 24, Sandycove Road, this building is now ‘Tara Hall’. He was taken from the preparatory school and returned to the Wesleyan for a period of nine months. By the end of 1868, he had done so badly in examinations, and had fallen so far behind, that he was withdrawn from Wesley, quote “I may add that I was incorrigibly idle and worthless as a school boy, and am proud of the fact”. Incompetent as a teaching institution, the Wesleyan seemed to him to be everything that a school ought not to be, quote “My cuse on it, forget it”. In February 1869, Shaw was sent to The Central Model Boys’ School in Marlborough Street. In September 1869 he was moved once more to the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School which was sponsored by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. He remained there for almost two years and became joint head boy. But his repugnance for all his schools was implacable. He later said that he regretted having gone to school at all, and that he valued nothing he had experienced there.

In 1876 Shaw left Dublin to follow his mother and sisters to London, where, for the next nine years, he strove to establish himself as a writer and completed five unsuccessful novels. His plays, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, and Candida were not to the critics’ taste in the 1890’s but are all internationally acclaimed today. The Devil’s Disciple was acclaimed in New York and brought Shaw his first royalties in 1897. The following year he married Charlotte Payne-Townsend, a wealthy Anglo-Irish associate of Shaw’s Fabian Friends. It was not until 1904 that his genius was recognised in Britain with John Bull’s Other Island, Man and Superman and The Doctor’s Dilemma further establishing Shaw’s reputation. His popularity in Britain took a knock when he protested against the executions of leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916.

Although Shaw considered Heartbreak House to be his best play, many would have chosen St Joan which was produced in London in 1924. St Joan established Shaw as the world’s greatest living playwright and was probably the decisive work in his claim to the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A life long socialist, pursuer of women’s rights and advocate of the new phonetic alphabet, he lived to the age of 94. At his death in November 1950 the lights on New York’s Broadway were extinguished in his honour.

Tara Hall Bed & Breakfast,24 Sandycove Road,
Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Te/Faxl: + 353 1 2805120
Email: info@tara-hall.ie