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Terence Aloysious 'Terry' Bowler was born in London on 21 June 1928. His mother was from Dublin and his father from Dingle, Co. Kerry. The family was very musical and had their own Irish band, which during the war played in all the Irish Halls in London. Terry became interested in Irish dancing at the age of 11, when he began to take lessons from Maura Sheehan. In the early 1940s he joined Charlie Smith’s School of Irish Dancing in London and became one of its best dancers, coming second in the All England Championships in the late 1940s. He was also interested in teaching and in 1948 opened his first class in St. Monica’s Hall in Hoxton, East London.

Nancy Brown was born in Mallow on 6 November 1932, but grew up in Cork city. At the age of 4, she joined Joan Denise Moriarty’s ballet classes in Mallow but within a few months abandoned ballet and took up Irish dancing. Between the ages of 4 and 8 she was taught by Kevin O’Connell, Peggy McTaggart and finally by Cormac O’Keeffe, with whom she remained until the age of 18. She was the winner of the Junior Champion¬ships two years in succession at Feis Matiu. She also won the Munster championship in the 1940s and came second in the Thomond Belt in Limerick in 1949. In 1952, she moved to London for treatment for a medical condition, While waiting for corrective surgery, she joined Charlie Smith’s School of Irish Dancing in London, initially as a dancer and soon after as a teacher.

Nancy Brown met Terry Bowler in Chelsea at an Irish dancing event in 1952, and the couple married in 1956. They began teaching together in the Bowler School of Dancing in London in 1953, and in that same year were invited to do a tour in Lower Austria. In 1967, Terry and Nancy became the first married couple ever to achieve the A.D.C.R.G. examination at the same time. They both taught Irish dancing for the Inner London Education Authority from 1955 to 1990, and other classes until 1995. For many years, they also taught Irish dancing to the pupils of the Royal Ballet School. As teachers, the couple’s roles were very clear cut, Terry creating choreographies and Nancy polishing the acts. Their dance teams won numerous competitions, including the Figure Dance World Championships in the 1970s. In addition to his love of dancing, Terry Bowler was an accomplished graphic artist and columnist.

Victoria O’Brien started her dance training at the Irish National College of Dance in Dublin and is a graduate of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. She undertook further studies at the Laban Centre, London and completed a PhD in dance history at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. She is currently Dance Adviser at the Arts Council. An active dance historian and consultant, Victoria continues to research, lecture, and publish in the areas of Irish ballet history and cultural memory.

For a full biography of Seán Mac Diarmada, please refer to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/mac-diarmada-macdermott-sean-a5027.

For a full biography of Eugene O'Curry, please refer to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/ocurry-curry-o-comhrai-eugene-eoghan-a6664.

James Gaffney was born in Limerick on 12 October 1866 to Thomas Gaffney and Agnes Mary née Clune. He was educated at Crescent College, Limerick and gained a BA from University College Dublin in 1887. Later that year he became apprenticed to Patrick Shelton Connolly, a solicitor in Limerick. He qualified as a solicitor in November 1890. In 1907, he was appointed Crown Solicitor for county Limerick and served in that capacity until 1920. James Gaffney married Mary ('Cis') Spain in 1901 and by her had two sons and five daughters. He died in Limerick city on 21 October 1933.

David Bolger is an Irish dancer, choreographer and founder of the dance company CoisCéim.

Liv O’Donoghue trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in the UK, graduating in 2007 with the Outstanding Achievement Award. She then joined the school’s graduate company, Verve, touring and performing internationally while also completing her Graduate Diploma in Performance. Since then, she has worked and toured extensively with distinguished dance companies and choreographers, including Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Rex Levitates Dance Company (later renamed Liz Roche Company), and with other artists, including composers Christian Mason and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, and photographers Elena Galotta and Luca Truffarelli.

In addition to her collaboration with other artists, Liv O’Donoghue has developed her own choreographic practice. Her work has been shown at dance festivals in Ireland, Europe, Japan, and the USA. In 2011, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo. In 2012-2013, she undertook dance residencies at various European dance houses, including TanzQuarter in Vienna, as a Carte Blanche Artist for the multi-annual cooperation project Modul Dance. In 2012, she was also selected as an artist for the European dance project Act Your Age, in which choreographers research and create new work inspired and performed by senior individuals to tackle the issue of age and ageing. Her widely acclaimed work is supported by the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, and Dance Ireland.

Patricia Mulholland was the founder of the Irish Ballet School in Belfast and of the Irish Ballet Company, which made its debut in 1951 during the Festival of Britain in the Empire Theatre, Belfast. In 1953, at the request of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), Mulholland devised and produced the first Irish folk ballet, Cuchulain. A further group of ballets was sponsored by CEMA, including The Piper, The Dream of Angus Óg and Follow Me Down to Carlow. Other works in her extensive choreography, strongly influenced by Irish legends and folklore, include The Mother of Oisín, The Black Rogue, The Oul’ Lammas Fair in 1900, The Children of Lír, Phil the Fluter’s Ball and The Hound of Culann. Mulholland’s choreographies were not ballet in the classical sense but a form of folk ballet – Irish mythology interpreted by Irish dancers to Irish music and song. Patricia Mulholland is regarded as one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Irish traditional dancing and the founder of Festival Dance, a specialised form of Irish dancing which focuses on the individuality of each dancer’s style, thus breaking away from the more rigid and formulaic ‘Feis’ style.

The Odell family were Cromwellian settlers and have been associated with county Limerick since the mid-seventeenth century. In the 1770s, John Fitzcharles Odell built a house, Odellville, in the parish of Ballingarry. The property passed to the Morony family through the marriage of Helen Mary Odell to Edmund Morony in 1860.

A pioneer in Irish fiction, Kate O’Brien was born in Limerick on 3 December 1897 to horse-dealer Thomas O’Brien and his wife, Catherine Thornhill O’Brien. One of ten children, O’Brien had three older sisters, Mary, Clare and Nance (or Anne), and six brothers, John (or Jack), Thomas, Eric, Michael, Michael Alphonsus and Gerard William. Tragedy struck the young family in 1903 when Catherine O’Brien died of cancer. Kate O’Brien was just over five years of age at this time and was to become the youngest boarder at Laurel Hill, a French convent school in Limerick. O’Brien’s father passed away in 1916, and in that same year Kate received a county council scholarship to read French and English in University College Dublin.

Kate O’Brien graduated from University College Dublin with a B.A. degree in 1919, moving to England where she worked as a free-lance journalist for The Sphere, followed by a position in the foreign language department of The Manchester Guardian Weekly. In 1921, O’Brien moved to London, and taught at St. Mary’s Convent in Hampstead for approximately six months before travelling to the United States as a companion to her sister Nance and her husband Stephen O’Mara. O’Brien returned from the States in 1922 but this did not mark the end of her travels, moving to Spain that same year to work as a governess in Bilbao. O’Brien taught the children of the Areilza family over a ten-month period, forming a deep attachment to Spain that was to remain with her for the rest of her days. Returning to London in 1923, she married a young Dutchman, Gustaff Renier. However, this union was only to last eleven months before the couple separated.

Spanning nearly fifty years, Kate O’Brien’s literary career commenced in 1926 with the play Distinguished Villa. O’Brien’s first work was the result of a bet with a friend that she could write a play within a number of weeks. It was performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 2 May 1926 and was met with wide acclaim. Several other plays followed in 1927, including The Silver Roan, The Bridge and Set in Platinum. It was her first novel, Without My Cloak (published in 1931), however, that established O’Brien as a significant Irish writer. A chronicle of the Considine family, this work was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1934, O’Brien produced her second novel, The Ante-Room. This was followed two years later by its unsuccessful adaptation for the stage in London’s Queen Theatre, and in addition, the first of two works to be banned by the Censorship of Publications Board in Ireland, a novel entitled Mary Lavelle. Also addressing the subject of Spain is the highly personal travelogue Farewell Spain published in 1937, largely in response to the events surrounding the Spanish Civil War. This work was subsequently banned in Franco’s Spain and the author was forbidden access to the country until 1957 with the intervention of the Irish Ambassador to Spain. O’Brien’s play The Schoolroom Window was performed that same year at the Manuscript Theatre Club in London.

In 1938, O’Brien’s fourth novel, Pray for the Wanderer was published, and followed two years later by The Land of Spices, her second work to be banned in Ireland. O’Brien spent the early years of the Second World War in Oxford and London, working for the British Ministry of Information. The writer moved to Devon in 1942 boarding in the house of novelist, E.M. Delafield, and over the next year published The Last of Summer, which was performed as a play at the Phoenix Theatre in London and the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin between 1944 and 1945. The publication English Diaries and Journals was produced in 1943. O’Brien’s seventh novel, That Lady, was published in 1946. A great success, this work was published in North America as For One Sweet Grape. The novel was adapted for the stage in November 1949, directed by Guthrie McClintic and starring Katherine Cornell as Ana de Mendoza. The play opened in the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway, and in 1955, the novel was made into a motion picture.

Kate O’Brien returned to live in Ireland in 1950, buying a handsome property in Roundstone, county Galway. O’Brien continued to be productive in her new surroundings publishing her biographical work Teresa of Avila in 1951, followed by her eighth novel, The Flower of May in 1953. The writer travelled to Rome in Italy in the early months of 1954 in preparation for what was to become her ninth and final published novel, As Music and Splendour. A decade after her move to Roundstone, O’Brien returned to England, settling in Boughton, Kent. Whilst the 1960s did not yield any further fictional work, O'Brien produced another travelogue entitled My Ireland in 1962. A collection of reminiscences of her early family life, entitled Presentation Parlour, followed in 1963. In addition, the writer produced articles for different publications including her ‘Long Distance’ series in the Irish Times. O’Brien was involved with numerous literary organisations during her lifetime including P.E.N. and the Comunità Europea degli Scrittori (where she represented Ireland). Kate O’Brien died in Kent on 13 August 1974, aged 76, leaving behind a body of unfinished work including her memoirs and what would have been her tenth novel, Constancy.