I. The Great Leaving

The ships carried more than people. From the end of the seventeenth century, there was a steady drift of Irish men and women outward — soldiers to the armies of France and Spain, scholars to the Low Countries, priests to Salamanca, traders wherever the ports would have them. But after 1845, the drift became a flood. The Great Famine of 1845–52 killed a million people in Ireland and drove another million into ships bound for Liverpool, Glasgow, New York, Quebec, and Melbourne. Whole parishes emptied. Townlands in Tír Fhiachrach were abandoned. For a family whose name means “the dark one”, it was a dark century indeed.

By 1900 there were more people named O’Dowd, O’Dubhda, Dowd, Doody, or any of the forty–odd other Anglicisations living outside Ireland than within it. And unlike so many emigrant surnames, the name did not quietly vanish into the new soil. It rose — as MPs, bishops, barristers, poets, soldiers, and, in one particular case, as the man who gave the United States its time zones.

II. Britain — The First Stop

For many, England and Scotland were stepping–stones. The ferry from Dublin or Cork to Liverpool or Glasgow was cheap; American passage cost months of wages. Some families worked a generation in Manchester or the Scottish lowlands before saving enough to cross the Atlantic. Others never crossed, and their descendants are still there — in Liverpool, in London, in the mining valleys of Wales, and throughout Scotland.

Sir James Cornelius O’Dowd (1829–1903) was one who stayed. He rose through a legal career in the British Army, becoming Commissioner–General when the system of purchasing officers’ commissions was finally abolished in 1871. His task was to supervise the compensation of those whose commissions had been bought and could no longer be sold — a matter of considerable delicacy, touching the pockets of half the senior officer corps. He was appointed C.B. in 1895, knighted in 1900, and, on leaving the army, became a prolific journalist.

III. Across the Atlantic — America and Canada

The New World took the name in every form. In the United States, O’Dowd became Dowd; Dowd became Doody; Doody became Dowdy. Names were changed at the port of entry, or changed by the next generation trying to sound less Irish, or kept stubbornly in the old spelling by those who would not let the language go.

Charles F. Dowd stood with Sandford Fleming of Canada on the commission that, in 1883, divided the continent into four standard time zones — ending the chaos of railroads each keeping their own local time. Before Dowd’s scheme, there were more than three hundred separate “times” in use on American railroads. After it, there were four. The system is still in use today, on every clock from Maine to California.

Bishop James Thomas O’Dowd (1907–50) was born in San Francisco to a family that had come from Kerry. He earned a Ph.D. in education, served on Californian educational boards at every level, and was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco with the titular see of Cea. He identified a site in East Oakland for a new Catholic school, and was killed in a train crash before it opened. Archbishop Mitty dedicated the school in 1951 and named it Bishop O’Dowd High School. It has been teaching since 1952.

Northward, in Canada, Rev. Patrick O’Dowd (1813–91), a Louth man who had entered the Order of St Sulpice, opened an orphanage and a nursing home for the poor in Montreal. In 1877, on pilgrimage to Lourdes, his ship was reported lost at sea; prayers were offered for him in churches throughout Canada, and there was enormous rejoicing when he reappeared safe and well. Twice offered a bishopric — at Kingston and at Toronto — he refused both and worked as a simple curate until his death.

IV. To the Southern Hemisphere — Australia

Australia took a poet. In 1856, Bernard O’Dowd (1836–84) resigned from the Irish Revenue Police and made his way via America — where he visited his sisters — to Victoria. He joined the Victoria Police, married Anne Mulholland (whose family had left Ireland the following year), and raised four children before a police–horse injury ended his career. He died shortly after retirement, leaving his widow with a household of teenagers.

The eldest of those children, also Bernard O’Dowd (1866–1953), was the prodigy of the family — said to have read Milton’s Paradise Lost at the age of eight. He began teaching in a Catholic school in Ballarat, was dismissed as a “heretic” when his radical views became public, and moved to Melbourne in 1887. There he found work in the Supreme Court Library, rose to become Chief Parliamentary Draughtsman, and fell in with the radicals, anarchists and communists of the Lyceum. In 1897 he founded the Tocsin, a radical newspaper in which he denounced the powers of the Governor–General. Between 1903 and 1921 he published six volumes of poetry, and was named Australia’s first National Poet. He refused a knighthood.

His eldest son, Colonel Bernard O’Dowd, served with distinction in the Second World War — wounded in the Middle East, returned to Australia, sent to New Guinea against the Japanese, and later to the Korean War. He retired with the rank of Lieutenant–Colonel and the M.B.E. His memoirs, In Valiant Company, were published in 2000.

V. The Name in Ireland — Those Who Stayed

Not every O’Dubhda sailed. Many stayed, and in the new century some rose to national prominence.

John Klyne O’Dowd (1802–79), a Castlebar man, was regarded as one of the finest barristers of his generation. During the Mayo general election of 1835 he crossed swords with Daniel O’Connell — who wrote afterwards to Archbishop MacHale that “the only reason I had to entertain the least apprehension was from seeing the published proceedings of Mr O’Dowd and others, who, at this distance, appeared to me to be placing themselves in the attitude to do mischief.”

John O’Dowd, M.P. (1856–1937) of Tubbercurry was a Nationalist who had been imprisoned for his views. A contributor of poems to the Weekly News, he was returned unopposed as M.P. for North Sligo in 1900 on the death of Bernard Collery — and then, in the general election later that same year, returned unopposed for South Sligo, giving him the unique distinction of being twice returned unopposed in one year for two different constituencies. He served as an advocate of Home Rule in the House of Commons and as Chairman of Sligo County Council until Sinn Féin swept the 1918 elections. His obituaries described him as “a loss to the Nationalist movement.”