A tribute to Howard

I have been in correspondence for some time now with an Irish writer called Rosemary Raughter. She has been researching my great grandfather Howard's sister, Louie Coade, as she has an interest in women's history and the Irish suffrage movement in which Louie was involved. As her research has progressed she has also found out more about Howard, and has produced a delightful brief account of his life here. My mother and grandmother would have been so pleased to know that he was still thought of and written about. I recall visiting Wexford and Wicklow with Mum in around 1990. We went to the Wexford graveyard to see if we could find Howard's grave but as the light began to fade I felt sure that we would not find him; there seemed to be no order to the graves that I could discern in my hurried survey. As I was walking back to where Mum was waiting, it was as though someone tapped my shoulder, and there, just to my left was his gravestone, one amongst many, indistinguishable from the rest. I collected Mum and brought her to his resting place. I will never forget the way her face crumpled and tears came as she said "oh I so wish I had known my grandfather". A recent entry from her diary talks of having a bureau, which Howard had made when his three girls were young, moved into her bedroom so she could sit at it and write. She talks about

"the picture of my Grandpa which I framed and which stands on top of the bureau. It is an extraordinary thing, but this room had a different atmosphere from any part of the rest of the house and I feel in some silly way that if that picture were taken away it would lose that restful feeling which is just the right atmosphere for writing a journal in. That photo has a feeling about it which is impossible to explain, but somehow it makes me feel there is another presence in the room. I always see it first thing on entering the room, and yet it is well above my eye level and rather hidden in a way on top of the bureau"

This is the image which she had carefully framed and placed in her room as a sort of guardian spirit of her youthful writings.