Anois agus arís
The Peter Berresford Ellis Column Matthias O’Conway of Galway takes his place in history as America’s first professional language teacher and publisher of language learning books that set the format for all modern language learning methods.
He was actually born Mathgamain Ó Conbhuidhe, a native Irish speaker, just outside Galway city in 1766.
Not much is known of his early life except that he spoke only Irish until he was eight years old and then was sent to school where he learnt English, Latin, Greek, dancing and, interestingly, the use of the sword. We also know that by the age of 15 he was living in Galway.
The major change in his life came in June 1781. The Dublin Evening Post reported that 30 Jewish refugees from Gibraltar had arrived by ship in Galway and had settled there. They had, in fact, fled from the fighting over Gibraltar between the English and Franco-Spanish forces.
Young Matt O’Conway became friends with the refugees. Displaying a natural gift for languages, being bilingual in Irish and English, he set about learning both Hebrew and Spanish from them. It was the start of a lifelong fascination by languages.
It was hard for the young man to keep out of the political agitation of the day. Walter Lawrence of Lawrencetown had formed a Galway Corps of Volunteers, known as the Bellevue Volunteers, in April 1782. He was a supporter of Grattan’s Parliament in Dublin and a delegate to the National Volunteer Convention of 1784.
The administration were alarmed by the Irish Volunteers and it was over the agitation surrounding the Volunteers and clashes that resulted in street fighting that O’Conway was accused of engaging in ‘a bold and impudent act’. What this was is not recorded, but it resulted in the young man, no more than 18 years old, having to flee from Ireland.
He went to the Caribbean first. Perhaps there is a significance that John Lawrence had an estate in the West Indies which he had inherited from his mother. However, O’Conway quickly moved on to New Orleans, which was then ruled by Spain. Indeed, most of the area was controlled by one of the regiments of Spain’s Irish Brigade. The Hibernia Regiment was based mainly in Cuba but detachments were stationed in Louisiana. Here he perfected his Spanish, whose rudiments he had learnt in Galway from the Gibraltarian Jews. He also became fluent in French.
It is also significant, that he journeyed from New Orleans to Havana, Cuba, the headquarters of the Hibernia Regiment and is recorded as being a pallbearer when the reputed ashes of Christopher Columbus were paraded in a holy procession.
His last move was to Philadelphia, where he worked as a teacher of French and Spanish in the city, being appointed as the Official Interpreter for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
He married in Philadelphia and had six sons and four daughters. His daughter Cecilia Marie O’Conway (1788-1865) became the first follower of St. Elizabeth Seton (1774-1821) the founder of the Sisters of Charity at St John the Evangelist Church, Philadelphia.
There still survives a set of hand-written letters from St. Elizabeth Seton to O’Conway, in the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Records Center, which shows that O’Conway was a friend of the saint.
Not all O’Conway’s children survived to adulthood and most of them seemed to have a rebellious adventurous spirit. Three of them went south to Latin America to fight Spain for the independence of Venezuela and Mexico.
James was an officer in the Barlovento Regiment of Simon Bolivar’s revolutionary army in Venezuela and was killed in 1812 leading a charge against the Spanish.
Joseph became a doctor and served in the same regiment but returned to fight for the Americans against the British in the battle of New Orleans (1815). He settled in Mexico and married and was last known to be writing to his father from Vera Cruz.
O’Conway was now working on literary translations. In 1805 in Paris the Comédie Francaise had performed a play entitled Les Templiers by M. Raynouard. O’Conway translated it into English and it was published by Brown and Merrit, Philadelphia in 1809 as The Knights Templars, a historical tragedy.
It was in Philadelphia that O’Conway began to develop his language teaching techniques and sought to write them down as a system. In 1809, he produced Rasgos Historicos y Morales sacados de autores celebres de diversas naciones, a work for the instruction of students in idiomatic Spanish. This became a classic instructional work that has been hailed as the start of the modern method of learning languages.
In 1810. came O’Conway’s principle work, an Hispano-Anglo Grammar that is regarded as the first systematic-based language learning method.
By the time of his death in 1842, O’Conway had returned to his native language and was attempting to complete a new English-Irish dictionary. Sadly this was not completed. However, many of his papers survive and were eventually lodged in the National Library of Ireland. |
