Life
1877-1947 [pseud. of Richard Valentine Williams], b. 2 April, Belfast;
became mg.-dir. of family firm, McBride and Williams, producing cotton
handkerchiefs, which folded up in 1931; issued Apollo in Mourne (1926),
the story in which the Greek God wins and renounces the love of Mary Blane
in favour of her swain Paddy Soye; Chairman of Northern Ireland Unemployment
Assistance Board; ran Mourne Press during World War II, failing in 1942;
poetry, The City of Refuge (Dublin 1917); Workers (1923);
Sonnets for Felicity (1942); best known for Apollo in Mourne
(1926), a mock heroic play on the lines of Synge’s Playboy;
published first collections of Sam Hanna Bell and Michael McLaverty; lived
in Newcastle, Co. Down; author of ‘Ballad of ‘oul Kate, the
Washerwoman’; d. 25 April. DIW
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Works
The City of Refuge and Other Poems (Dublin: Maunsel 1918), vii+80pp.;
Workers, poems with woodcuts by E. M. O’Reilly Dickey (London:
Duckworth 1923), 39pp.; The Old Gods and Other Poems (London: Duckworth
1925), 59pp. [infra]; Apollo in Mourne (London:
Duckworth 1926); Selected Poems (London: Duckworth 1931), 149pp.;
Tales of Mourne (London: Duckworth 1937), stories [incl. ‘Apollo
in Mourne’]; Ballads of Mourne (Dundalk: Tempest 1940), 95pp.;
One Cure for Sorrow and Other One-Act Plays (Newcastle, Co Down:
Mourne Press 1942); Sonnets for Felicity (Newcastle, Co Down: Mourne
Press 1942); The Piper of Mourne (Belfast: Derrick MacCord 1944);
Final Harvest [poems] (Belfast: H. R. Carter 1951), viii+27pp.;
also Victor Price, ed. and intro., Apollo in Mourne: Poems, Plays,
and Stories of Richard Rowley, (Belfast: Blackstaff [1977]), 137pp.
The Old Gods and Other Poems (London: Duckworth 1925), 59pp. [ded. to Stephen Gwynn; title poem ded. AE, pp.16-18: [‘The dark by mystic light is filled;/Heaven’s windows in grim factories shine;/With all his bricks he cannot build/A wall to shut out the Divine’]; also ‘Come Away!’, p.43; author of The City of Refuge; Lily Says; Workers; County Down Songs, woodcuts by Lady Mabel Annesley.
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Criticism
Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Poets from Ulster (1975),
pp.76-83.
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Notes
Donagh MacDonagh [ed., & intro.], Poems from Ireland
(Dublin: The Irish Times 1944), contains a short biography citing
him as a Belfast man who has published a dozen books of verse; founded
in 1942 the Mourne Press and published there some interesting and significant
books.
Robert Hogan, Dictionary of Irish Literature (Greenwood Publ. 1996), cites AE [George Russell], review of Workers, in Irish Homstead, 12 May 1933): ‘[T]here are no illusions about the life he depicts’.
Belfast Public Library holds 15 titles including Apollo in Mourne (1926); Ballads of Mourne (1940, 1949); The City of Refuge and other poems (1917); County Down Songs (1924, 1942); The Old Gods (1925); One Cure for Sorrow, and other one act plays (1948); Selected Poems (1931); Tales of Mourne (1937).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)