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BUCK WHALEY
David Ryan was born in Galway and holds an MA degree in history from NUI Galway. His first book, Blasphemers and Blackguards: The Irish Hellfire Clubs, was published by Merrion Press in 2012. David currently lives in Dublin where he works as a television producer and scriptwriter.
BUCK WHALEY
IRELAND’S GREATEST ADVENTURER
DAVID RYAN
First published in 2019 by
Merrion Press
An imprint of Irish Academic Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© David Ryan, 2019
9781785372292 (Paper)
9781785372308 (Kindle)
9781785372315 (Epub)
9781785372322 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover front: Portrait of Thomas Whaley as a youth (Mervyn Whaley).
Cover back: Jerusalem from the north by David Roberts, 1839 (New York Public Library).
For Karla
‘Know, my friends, that my father … died whilst I was still a child, leaving me great wealth and many estates and farmlands. As soon as I came of age and had control of my inheritance, I took to extravagant living. I clad myself in the costliest robes, ate and drank sumptuously, and consorted with reckless prodigals of my own age, thinking that this mode of life would endure for ever.
It was not long before I awoke from my heedless folly to find that I had frittered away my entire fortune … I sold the remainder of my lands and my household chattels for the sum of three thousand dirhams, and, fortifying myself with hope and courage, resolved to travel abroad.’
— The First Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor
CONTENTS
A Note on Sources, Citations and Abbreviations
5.Lightning and the Moon Rising
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There used to be a nightclub called ‘Buck Whaley’s’ on Leeson Street in Dublin. I never visited it, but I used to work just around the corner from it and I think that somehow ‘Buck’ himself would have approved of the flamboyant lettering on its sign. The nightclub is no more, but for around thirty years everyone who walked past it or stepped over its threshold must have realised that a character of this name existed – that is, if they didn’t know already. But it wasn’t this late-night venue or its sign that first drew my attention to Thomas Whaley, it was his alleged connection with the Dublin Hellfire Club, which consumed my attention for a while when I was writing my first book. At that time I got in touch with Mervyn Whaley, Thomas’s descendant, who kindly invited me to his home to see the stunning oval portrait of his ancestor, the only individual likeness of him still in existence. Mervyn told me that there was quite a bit of primary source material on Whaley out there if I could get access to it. I realised that there was a book to be written and a story to be told, but I never imagined how extraordinary that story would turn out to be.