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. Thomas Power O'Connor died in 1929.
T. P. O'Connor wrote about Mosley that he "would always be regarded by every good Irishman with appreciation and gratitude. I regard him as the man who really began the break-up of the "Black and Tan" savagery : and I never recall without admiration and wonder, the courage and self-sacrifice which such an attitude demanded on his part" |
