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 a great many of those who carried the name, as O’Dowd, Dowd, Doody, or any of its forty-odd recorded spellings, were living outside Ireland. 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 first proposed America’s 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. Called to the bar in 1859, he served as Deputy Judge Advocate General of the British Army from 1869 to 1899, through the years in which the purchase of officers’ commissions was abolished (1871). He was appointed C.B. and was knighted in 1900.

III. Across the Atlantic — America and Canada

The New World took the name in every form. In the United States, O’Dowd often became Dowd, and the spellings multiplied. 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 (1825-1904), a Connecticut-born schoolmaster of Saratoga Springs, was the first to propose standard time zones for the American railroads: in 1870 he published a scheme of four zones to end the confusion of every line keeping its own local time. The system the railroads finally adopted in November 1883 was drawn up by William F. Allen, but four zones it was, and they are still in use. Dowd’s family had been in America since the 1630s; whether that Dowd line has Irish roots is not settled in the documentary record.

Bishop James Thomas O’Dowd (1907–50) was born in San Francisco. He earned a doctorate at the Catholic University of America and was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco, with the titular see of Cea, in 1948. He died in February 1950, after the car he was travelling in was struck by a freight train. The new East Oakland Catholic high school that opened in 1951 was named in his memory: Bishop O’Dowd High School.

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. It is told that in 1877, on pilgrimage to Lourdes, his ship was reported lost at sea, and that there was great rejoicing in Montreal when he returned safe. Named coadjutor bishop of Toronto in 1852, and later offered the sees of Kingston and Halifax, he refused all three and remained parish priest of St Patrick’s, Montreal, 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 late in 1885. In 1887 he was placed 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 co-founded the Tocsin, a radical weekly of the labour movement. Between 1903 and 1921 he published six volumes of poetry. In 1934 he declined a knighthood offered by the Prime Minister, J. A. Lyons.

Another Australian of the name, Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard (Ben) O’Dowd, born in Perth in 1918, served with the 2/11th Battalion through the Second World War, in the Middle East and New Guinea, winning the M.B.E. as a warrant officer. In Korea he commanded A Company of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, at Kapyong in April 1951. His history of the battalion’s war, In Valiant Company: Diggers in Battle, Korea 1950-51, was published in 2000.

V. The Name in Ireland — Those Who Stayed

Not every Ó Dubhda sailed. Many stayed, and some rose to national prominence.

James Klyne O’Dowd (1802-79), a Castlebar man, was a famous barrister of his day. 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 March 1900 on the resignation of Bernard Collery — and then, in the general election later that same year, returned unopposed for South Sligo, so that he was twice returned unopposed in a single year, for two different constituencies. He sat for South Sligo as an advocate of Home Rule until Sinn Féin swept the 1918 election, and for many years was Chairman of Sligo County Council.