Percival Arland Ussher (9 September 1899 – 24 December 1980) was an Anglo-Irish academic, essayist and translator. Ussher was born in

Battersea, London Battersea is a large district in south London, part of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is centred southwest of Charing Cross and extends along the south bank of the River Thames. It includes the Battersea Park. History Batte ...

, the only child of Emily Jebb (born on the Lyth estate, Ellesmere, Shropshire in 1872) and Beverley Grant Ussher, who was Irish. The Jebbs were a wealthy and influential family of reformers. Ussher's grandmother Eglantyne Louisa Jebb founded the

Home Arts and Industries Association The Home Arts and Industries Association was part of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain. It was founded in 1884 by Eglantyne Louisa Jebb, mother of Save the Children founders, Dorothy and Eglantyne Jebb and Louisa Wilkins who helped start t ...

, his aunt

Eglantyne Jebb Eglantyne Jebb (25 August 1876 – 17 December 1928) was a British social reformer who founded the Save the Children organisation at the end of the First World War to relieve the effects of famine in Austria-Hungary and Germany. She drafted th ...

founded

Save the Children The Save the Children Fund, commonly known as Save the Children, is an international non-governmental organization established in the United Kingdom in 1919 to improve the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic ...

, and another aunt, Dorothy Jebb Buxton, was a humanitarian. Beverley Ussher worked as a schools inspector for the Board of Education in England. The family lived in England until he retired in 1914, and they then moved to Ireland and lived at Cappagh House in Dungarvan, County Waterford. Emily Ussher tried to draw attention to the atrocities being committed by the

Black and Tans Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have ...

. Ussher studied at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. In 1926 he published a translation of ''The Midnight Court'' (''Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche'') by the Irish-language poet Brian Merriman. Ussher also published ''The Face and Mind of Ireland'' (1949) and ''Three Great Irishmen'' (1952), a comparative study of Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Ussher moved to County Waterford to manage the family's farm before moving to

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

in 1953.

References

External links

Emory University literature collectionArland Ussher Correspondence, 1921-1959
at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center 1899 births 1980 deaths 20th-century Irish writers 20th-century Anglo-Irish people Irish essayists English translators English essayists People from Battersea Translators from Irish Translators of Brian Merriman 20th-century British translators 20th-century British essayists {{academic-stub