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  • In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of Engineers, 1780-1888
  • Kerby A. Miller
In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of Engineers, 1780–1888. By Brendan O. Donoghue (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2006. xvi plus 338 pp. €45.00).

Brendan O Donoghue's In Search of Fame and Fortune: The Leahy Family of Engineers, 1780–1888, is superbly researched, well written, and beautifully illustrated. At first glance, it might appear to be a rather narrowly focused study, perhaps of interest only to specialists in the history of the nascent engineering profession in early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland and the British Empire, generally. However, O Donoghue's subject and its implications are broad and important, encompassing the development of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, emerging from the shadow of the eighteenth-century Penal Laws, and the seamier aspects of the Irish, British, and Imperial civil services and of the general processes of economic and infrastructural "development" in Ireland and in the Empire overseas.

In Search of Fame and Fortune focuses on the careers of Patrick Leahy, Sr. (c.1780–1850), of Co. Tipperary, and the three sons who, like their father, also became surveyors and engineers: Denis (c.1812–1862), Matthew (c.1818–1860), and especially Edmund (c.1813–1888), supplemented with data about another son, Patrick, Jr. (1806–1875), who entered the priesthood and in 1857 became Archbishop of Cashel. It is uncertain how Patrick, Sr., gained his initial training. Yet, by 1834 (and despite anti-Catholic prejudice) he had leveraged aristocratic and other connections gained in estate mapping and surveying on public works projects (including Ireland's famous Ordnance Survey) into an appointment as the first County Surveyor for County Cork's East Riding—as well as a simultaneous appointment for son Edmund (despite his youth) as County Surveyor for Cork's West Riding; in those posts, both men employed Denis and Matthew Leahy as surveyors and engineers in road construction, bridge building, and other public projects. O Donoghue describes Patrick, Sr., as "a competent all-rounder … when the demarcation between" surveying and engineering "was not as sharp as it was to become as the century progressed" (293). However, government parsimony kept official salaries very low, which in turn encouraged both Patrick, Sr., and Edmund Leahy to mix private (and more lucrative) work with their public duties—often, critics charged, to the latter's neglect. The eventual results were disastrous: in 1844 the collapse in scandal of Edmund's railroad [End Page 543] promotion schemes, and his and his brothers' general incompetence and malfeasance resulted in the dismissal of both father and son from their County Surveyor positions.

For the next two decades, the Leahys explored railroad building, mining, and other opportunities in the formal and informal British Empire: first in South Africa (where Patrick, Sr., died), then in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan provinces, and finally in the British West Indies. Despite their visible trails of failure and scandal, all three Leahy brothers gained imperial postings from the British Colonial Office. In the early 1860s Matthew and Denis won successive appointments as Colonial Engineer in Trinidad (where each died of "fever" shortly after arriving). And between 1858 and his dismissal (in disgrace) in 1863, Edmund served as Colonial Engineer and Architect in Jamaica, where his promotion of the infamous "Jamaica Tramway Scandal" (1862–65) discredited the island's entire system of colonial rule and helped provoke the Morant Bay Rebellion of October 1865. Edmund then returned to Ireland, entered politics (in a murky alliance with brother Patrick, Jr., the archbishop), and corrupted the 1868 election in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, so outrageously that Parliament nullified the results and disenfranchised the borough. After briefly sojourning in New York City, Edmund settled in London, where he was managing a Turkish bathhouse when perhaps fittingly) he was killed in a railroad accident.

O Donoghue's descriptions of the Leahys' careers are fascinating in themselves and illuminating with regard to many aspects of early nineteenth-century Irish, British, and Imperial socio-economic, administrative, and political history. They indicate, for example, that the history of engineering, law, and other emerging professions should take greater account of non-professional...

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