Daniel O'Connell

Daniel O'Connell (II) (1849 – 23 January 1899) was a poet, actor, writer and journalist in San Francisco, California, and a co-founder of the Bohemian Club. After the funeral, he was transferred without enthusiasm to Clongowes Wood College where he studied the classics for three years. O'Connell signed on with the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He travelled around Cape Horn to California in 1868.

Writer O'Connell worked for a number of periodicals in the San Francisco Bay Area. He edited the Morning Herald, the San Francisco Times, the Bulletin, the Chronicle, the Wasp, the Bohemian and the Portico. He helped Henry George found the San Francisco Daily Evening Post in 1871. a short story written for the Overland Monthly, and a yearly Christmas piece, "quaint, grotesque or poetical" because the "boys would go there sometimes when they should have reported at the office." when he wasn't being toasted as "the rightful King of Munster." O'Connell took part in many Bohemian poetry readings and stage plays, including a turn as King Macbeth of Scotland in the witches' scene from Macbeth. O'Connell was the first member to formally announce an upcoming "Jinks" (literary and musical performance)—his turn at host, or "Sire", of an evening's entertainment took place 30 November 1872 with the stated theme of "Tom Moore and Offenbach." The Jinks events at the club were usually cheerful and sometimes boisterous. One of O'Connell's Jinks announcements joked that the "opening discordancy" of the presentation would be played by the Bohemian Club's own musicians, "who have done so much to lower the rents in this neighborhood."

In 1876, O'Connell wrote the preface and edited a book of stories by William Henry Rhodes (a Bohemian who wrote under the pen-name "Caxton") entitled Caxton's Book. In 1878, O'Connell worked for The Mail, an early newspaper in San Francisco. With his adroit editing, O'Connell helped make famous the "Town Crier" column for the San Francisco News Letter, written by Ambrose Bierce, then by Ashton Stevens.

O'Connell wrote the libretto for a romantic opera entitled Bluff King Hal, working with fellow Bohemian Club member Humphrey John Stewart who composed the music. The opera was performed at San Francisco's Grand Opera House in 1892, with artist and Bohemian Amédée Joullin designing the costumes and painting the scenery, and architect and Bohemian Willis Polk modelling and designing the scenery.

O'Connell was elected honorary life member of the Bohemian Club in the late 1890s and was made club historian.

Charles Rollo Peters (1862-1928), the San Franciscan painter, a very close friend of his, designed two memorials for him, the memorial seat at Sausalito and a further one, located somewhere in the Marin hills. This memorial consists of a bronze tablet affixed to an oak tree bearing the words “In loving memory of Daniel O ’ Connell, poet, philosopher, friend.” In an interview Rollo said:

“There was a fitting celebration. Porter Ashe, Ned Hamilton and others recalled the good old days when “The Roseleaves ” fluttered about in madcap merriment. And then the tablet was left to Mother Nature and to the silence which is only broken by the soughing of the breeze through the branches and the music of the bee and the katydid . Only the wanderer in the hills or the devout pilgrim seeking out shrines of song will find the tablet on the oak. “Dan O ’Connell loved God ’s out-of-doors, ” said Peters when I asked him about the memorial . “He delighted in life in the open . He was an excellent shot, a skilled fly fisher and an expert yachtsman . So it seemed right to commemorate him in the hills and among the trees.”