RM Smyllie

Robert Maire Smyllie (born March 20, 1893 in Glasgow ; died September 11, 1954 in Dublin ) was an Irish journalist. From 1934 until his death in 1954 he was editor of the Irish Times .

Life

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Smyllie came from a Presbyterian family and grew up in Sligo , where his father was active as a journalist since 1892 as the owner and editor of the local newspaper The Sligo Times . From 1911 to 1913 he studied at Trinity College, Dublin and then found a job in Berlin as a private tutor for the offspring of a wealthy American. When the First World War broke out , he was imprisoned as a British citizen in the Ruhleben internment camp , where he had to stay until the end of the war in 1918. Here he appeared for the first time journalistically with articles in the bi-weekly camp newspaper The Ruhleben Camp Magazine .

Shortly after his release, he was hired by the Dublin-based Irish Times as a reporter for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference . After his return to Ireland, he reported for the paper mainly on domestic political developments, became one of the country's most famous journalists with his articles and revelations and finally, in 1934, after the death of James Healy, his successor as editor of the newspaper. Under his leadership, the pro-British newspaper, which had previously been shaped by the politically and economically predominant elite of the “Protestant Ascendancy”, gradually repositioned itself and approached the republican-nationalist zeitgeist, the politics of the Irish Free State (until 1937) and then the Republic of Ireland certain; but until his death in 1954 he was also the Dublin correspondent for the London Times . As a staunch opponent of fascism , he reported on developments in Central Europe until the outbreak of World War II . For a report on the Sudeten crisis , he was awarded the Order of the White Lion on February 15, 1939 , the highest state award in Czechoslovakia for foreigners. After the outbreak of war, as editor, he repeatedly came into conflict with the state press censorship that was tightened at the time .

Smyllie was also a defining figure in the Dublin literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s. He sponsored budding writers such as Brendan Behan and Brian O'Nolan , whom he hired in 1940 for the Cruiskeen Lawn column , which appeared until O'Nolan's death in 1966 and whose texts are now part of the canon of Irish literature. Smyllie himself published a mostly weekly column under the pseudonym Nichevo since the 1920s and was also the first author of the An Irishman's Diary column, which is still published today, from 1927 .

Smyllie was also considered a living person and eccentric . He was severely overweight and prone to alcoholism . His mother he promised on her deathbed not to touch alcohol, he therefore subsequently at Whiskey Drinking wore white gloves. He often wore a green sombrero on the street .

literature

• Tony Gray: Mr. Smyllie, sir. Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 1991, ISBN 0-7171-1790-1 .
• Caleb Richardson: Transforming Anglo-Ireland: RM Smyllie and the Irish Times . In: New Hibernia Review 11: 4, 2007. pp. 17-36.

Web links

• The Irish Times: The Editors .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Smyllie’s people: The Irish Times editor and southern Protestant identity . The Irish Times, June 1, 2019
2. ↑ https://readingthetwentiethcentury.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/for-the-greatest-single-irony-of-an-beal-bocht/