The O'Shea brothers, enormously talented, and insuppressibly unconventional

The museum Building at Trinity College, Dublin was designed by architects, Deane & Woodward however the stone carvings on doors, windows and capitals were carried out by the brothers John and James O’Shea along with their nephew Edward Whelan from Cork. These stone masons were of considerable talent and the building with its Gothic revival style is impressive even to this day.  It seems the brothers were trusted to be creative and given a degree of freedom in how they worked.

 “Woodward allowed the brothers considerable flexibility and they carved their designs in situ. It is said that they worked from material gathered from the College Botanic Gardens, in Ballsbridge. The keen-eyed may spot cats, snakes, frogs, squirrels and birds, lurking among shamrock, daffodils, oak, ivy, lilies, and acanthus.”

Patrick Wyse Jackson’s ‘A Victorian Landmark: Trinity College’s Museum Building’ in the Irish Arts Review Yearbook 1995, p.151 

Their realism in the stonework is impressive in its detail and the use of depth and negative space is particularly stunning. In places the leaves appear as if curled back to reveal berries behind them.  The usual practise was to carve at ground level and have the work inspected for accuracy and skill before being lifted into situ. However, such was skill of the O’Shea’s they were allowed to carve unworked blocks of stone already lifted high into their final position in the building. The brothers achieved some reknown after their work on Trinity College and on Kildare Street Club.  This later club was described by George Moore in contemptuous terms, 

“The Kildare Street Club is one of the most important institutions in Dublin. … it represents all that is respectable, that is to say, those who are gifted with an oyster-like capacity for understanding this one thing: that they should continue to get fat in the bed in which they were born. This club is a sort of oyster bed into which all the eldest sons of the landed gentry fall as a matter of course…”

The O’Shea brothers incorporated a rather creative criticism of their own in the Kildare Street Club window piece which presents the club members as monkeys playing billiards.  It was clear that these brothers had not only creative ability but also a sense of humour that they freely expressed in their beautiful stone work.

Another example of their creative skills is to be found in Oxford Museum which was opened in 1860.  Henry Acland, a Reader in Anatomy at Christ Church campaigned to have a new museum for both research and teaching purposes.  In particular, he wanted to bring together in one place all the extensive collections that Oxford University had accumulated over the years.  In the open competition for architects for the new museum, Deane and Woodward, of Dublin won with their neo-Gothic design.  Their success was in part due to their earlier success in designing Trinity College Museum in Dublin.  The Oxford Museum was heavily influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin who felt that architecture should be shaped by the natural world. This museum has its place in history as within a year of it being completed it was the venue for the famous debate on Darwin’s Origin of the Species. 

Each column surrounding the court is made of a different British rock while the capitals and corbels are carved into a range of plants.

These carvings took two years to complete (1858-1860) and James and John O’Shea with their nephew Edward Whelan once again demonstrated their exceptional talent as stonemasons of both high quality and creativity.  They used living specimens from the botanic garden to inform their work.  The brothers started working on carvings around the outer windows but a shortage of funds and the constant interference of University officials (the Members of Convocation) meant that the project was never completed.

O’Shea was said to be so incensed he carved owls and parrots as a parody of the University Convocation and was immediately sacked.  He had been heard shouting from high up on the scaffolding,  "Parrhots and Owwls! Parrhots and Owwls! Members of Convocation!" University officials were so angry about this parody that they accused the O’Sheas of "defacing" the building with unauthorised work.

These unfinished carvings are still visible today over the main entrance of the museum. The remaining capitals, which had to be subsequently finished in 1910 by other stonemasons, are easily identifiable as they are so evidently beneath the standard of the work of the O’Shea brothers.

The O'Sheas and Whelan would later work with Woolner and the architect Alfred Waterhouse in the design of the Manchester assize courts. 

They produced a series of capitals depicting gruesome forms of punishment in history for this building, an unusual choice for a court building! The original building was demolished following bomb damage in World War Two however some of the brother’s carvings survive in the replacement building.

These enormously talented, and insuppressibly unconventional, mason sculptors, the O'Sheas have certainly left their mark on memorable historical buildings.  Twenty years after working at the Oxford Museum James O’Shea, left his family in Manchester to return to Oxford. However, by this time he was homeless, an alcoholic and he would tragically die here.  It feels perverse that a talent that had beautified one of the most historic buildings of Oxford would find himself living destitute and die alone on those very same streets.

The One That Got Away

Abraham Wald, was a gentle kind-hearted man with a genius that was breathtaking.  He was born in Hungary in 1902 and was the son of a Jewish baker.  Fascinated with equations he studied hard and became a graduate student at the University of Vienna.  His mentor was the great mathematician Karl Menger.  Karl Menger had attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Vienna where two of his fellow students were Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1938 ) and Richard Kuhn (Nobel Prize for Physics in 1945).  It is perverse that in just one city during a short period of time so many great minds began their careers.

Menger would pose problems to the young Wald, problems that stumped great minds across academia.  Wald would spend time reflecting on his given task and invariably return within a month with a solution to the problem and an urgent request for another to solve.  His hunger for problems and ability to solve them became known to mathematicians in the US.  When the Nazi threat grew this mathematical prodigy was able to flee, albeit reluctantly, to the US from Vienna.  It was a timely move.  His entire family of nine members, bar one single brother, died in the extermination camp Auschwitz.

Wald was put to work in the US on the Applied Mathematics Panel.  This group was posed questions by the military and they would use their mathematical ability to answer the query.  For example, the navy was trying to shoot torpedoes against Japanese vessels  The panel was able to work out the speed of the ship from the distance between the crests of waves.  They then had to factor in some adjustments to take into account the turning motion of the ship but once they had the equations their predictions matched real life experience and proved invaluable in targeting ships.  At times what appeared real life observations could be the thing that gives you a totally wrong answer. 

The World War 2 bombing crews would limp back home peppered by bullet holes.  So high were the losses, the military examined the planes that returned to see what particular areas on the plane needed reinforced with steel plates.  It would be impossible to reinforce the entire plane as they could not fly with such weight.  After careful investigation they noticed that the bullet holes were found mostly along the wings, down the centre of the body and in the tail.  The military wanted to put the armour on the areas where holes appeared to be clustered.  Wald with his usual insightful genius stated that putting the armour there would be of no benefit at all.  He had instantly recognised that the holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still make it home.  The armour should be put on the areas where there were no bullet holes, the engine, stabilisers etc.  Any bullet hitting those would never have made it home.  He could see the survivor bias that was derailing the statistical analysis the military was so proud of.

This quiet likeable genius was an inspired problem solver.  It was his passion and his talent.  Wald published papers on geometry which were described, by his mentor Menger, as:-

... deep, beautiful and of fundamental importance.

He was an excellent teacher who was renown for being

“ a master at deriving complicated results in amazingly simple ways”.

He died in his late forties while on a lecture tour in India in a plane crash.  Having saved so many who flew, with his mathematical genius, it is strangely disturbing that it was a plane that ended his life.