T P O'Connor - Fleet Street, London, UK
N 51° 30.847 W 000° 06.393
30U E 700761 N 5710968
This bust of TP O'Conner is fitted to the wall of a building on the south side of Fleet Street.
Waymark Code: WMHE41
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 06/29/2013
Views: 8
The plaque, beneath the bust, reads:
T.P. O'Connor
Journalist
& Parliamentarian
1848 - 1929
His pen could lay bare
the bones of a book or
the soul of a statesman
in a few vivid lines
The bronze bust, that is about life-size, sits
atop a granite block.
The Spartacus
Educational website tells us:
Thomas Power O'Connor was born in Athlone in 1848. After an education at
Queen's College, Galway, and became a journalist for the Saunders'
Newsletter in Dublin before moving to London to work for the Daily
Telegraph.
O'Connor held radical political opinions and in 1880 General Election became
the Irish Nationalist MP for Galway. He continued to work as a journalist
and in 1887 founded and edited the radical newspaper, The Star.
Henry Hamilton Fyfe, the future editor of the Daily Mail and the Daily
Mirror, claimed that with O'Connor's was the founder of what became known as
the New Journalism. One important innovation introduced by The Star was the
regular political cartoon. O'Connor also founded other radical newspapers
including The Sun (1893) and T.P.'s Weekly (1902).
O'Connor wrote several books including a critical biography of Benjamin
Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield (1879), The Parnell Movement (1886) and Memoirs
of an Old Parliamentarian (1928). O'Connor also returned to the Daily
Telegraph, where he became the main contributors to its famed obituaries
section.