John Birmingham, Millbrook House, Milltown, Co. Galway

By Professor Paul Mohr (retired Dept of Geology, NUI Galway)

John Birmingham, a forgotten 19th-century poet, musician, geologist, surveyor, and astronomer par excellence, is not forgotten on the map of the Moon.  There the crater named after him resides near to prominent Plato, at the northern horizon of our satellite on which he wrote so eloquently. Clarity of thought and power of intellect informed this singular Galway landlord, the last in a long line descended from the Barons of Athenry. John Birmingham was tallest among the tall men of the Galway-Mayo border country, an athlete with "a strength unequalled" yet paradoxically possessed of "a child-like humility".  His transparent honesty and an absence of self-assertion were disarming or even disconcerting to his scientific peers, and provide one reason why he failed to figure in what might be termed 'the national gallery'.

The young John Birmingham spent six years in Berlin according to local tradition. Precisely where and doing what is not recorded, but at the age of forty, in 1857, he emerged into the public eye with an excellent knowledge of cometary science. One suspects the influence of Johann Encke, Director of the Berlin Observatory and calculator of cometary orbits.

It was in his fiftieth year that John Birmingham attracted the attention of astronomers the world wide.  Shortly before midnight on 12 May 1866, his roving and knowledgable eye perceived a star in the constellation of Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown) where no star was previously to be seen with the naked eye.  It was the brightest "nova" in the heavens since 1604, and its discovery astonished and excited the global astronomical community. For John Birmingham had quickly informed William Huggins at the Tulse Hill Observatory in London, who immediately applied his newly developed spectroscope to the star.

In one of his letter's to the Royal Astronomical Society he wrote " The above star, which I found on the 22nd of May last, and which then appeared of the 9th magnitude, and reached 8 m. on June 8, seems now no more than 12 m. Estimations of very small magnitudes are, of course, very difficult, but I believe I am not under the mark in saying 12 m., as I found the star not easy with a 4½.inch O.G. At the same time its deep crimson seemed very striking by glimpses, and in its present state it if, perhaps, the smallest among the stars whose red colour has been observed. It will probably have to be classed among the most remarkable variables"

For the first time, a "nova" was revealed to astronomers to be a titanic stellar explosion of superheated hydrogen gas.  From this discovery, John Birmingham came into correspondence with leading astronomers in Ireland, Britain, and especially Germany - for he had fluent German. It was likely Professor Julius Schmidt, recently appointed as Director of the Athens Observatory, who, in drafting his new and magnificently detailed map of the Moon, ascribed the name 'Birmingham' to a walled plain near the north pole of the Moon.

John Birmingham now purchased a 4 & 1/2-inch Cooke refracting telescope to support his astronomical enthusiasms into becoming a full-time avocation. Whenever night-skies were clear he would be sitting, cramped from dusk to dawn, in his little wooden observatory erected on a flat roof at Millbrook House. In 1872, at the suggestion of the Rev. Thomas Webb of Hereford, he commenced a systematic study of red, variable stars. Astronomers were becoming aware that these stars had a fundamental place in a possible evolutionary stellar sequence.

Four years later, such was John Birmingham's industry that he had accumulated and put in order a massive catalogue which he presented to the Royal Irish Academy. The Academy published the catalogue in its 1877 'Transactions', and it immediately attracted widespread attention as well as establishing John Birmingham's reputation as one of the foremost amateur astronomers in Ireland. 

Seven years later - and only months before his death - he was awarded the Academy's Cunningham Gold Medal for his outstanding astronomical researches.   The photo above was taken at midnight on August 13th 2009 with Corona Borealis hanging over the ruins of the Birmingham House.

But it was not only in meticulous celestial observation that John Birmingham excelled. He had a gift for communicating leading-edge science in terms that the layman could easily understand. He was, we might say, Ireland's Patrick Moore of the time. In clarent Ciceronian prose he expounded enthusiastically on comets, lunar craters, and a host of planetary topics.

John Birmingham's essays were warmly praised by his contemporaries, including the 'Irish Times'. Yet there was one work of John Birmingham's which that eminent journal certainly did not care to notice.

Published in January 1863, 'Anglicania, or England's Mission to the Celt' was a 166-page poem defending Ireland's unflinching Catholic faith against a new wave of Protestant fundamentalist 'missionising' in the West of Ireland.  It is surely one of the most extraordinary works to have emerged from 19th century Ireland. Written in charity and Chaucerian couplets, it exposed the contradictions within and between the many theological offshoots of the Reformation. It then touched on a nerve: the hypocrisy of an English high moral tone when the 'missionaries' efforts would have been more appropriate christianising England. Contemporary reviewers were reminded of John Dryden's 'The Hind and the Panther'.  'Anglicania' contains several lyrical passages evoking the beauty of the mountains, coasts and islands of Connemara and the western world.  John Birmingham always loved this work, yet it faded rapidly into obscurity, failing as it did to slot into any literary category.  Besides 'Anglicania', John Birmingham wrote humorous verse of which 'The Peeler and the Cat' is a splendid example.  Humour, varying from satire through irony to the impish, was never far from John Birmingham's heart. John Birmingham's recreations, for which he would have had precious little spare time, included playing his piano and a Stradivarius violin.

John Birmingham in old age was an abstemious and gaunt giant of a man, who still could stride the seven miles Irish from Millbrook to a Guardians meeting in Tuam, and the seven miles back home that same evening.  In 1877 he made an individual and wondrously successful re-surveying of the route for the projected Tuam-Claremorris railway line. Yet for all his zest and strength his was the gentlest of dispositions. Any instance of cruelty to animals pained him, and he was appalled by vivisection. Notwithstanding his renown as an amateur astronomer, John Birmingham remained an attentive and diligent landlord, continuing to reside at Millbrook House to the very end of his life.

During his last years, John Birmingham's sense of public duty led him to overexert and overtax himself in serving the community of North Galway. "He was overwhelmed with work, with much care and great anxiety to do all things correctly and faithfully. He took these things too much to heart, and so brought on that insidious disease to which after three weeks ailing he at length succumbed". This rare Christian gentleman died at Millbrook on Sunday, 7 September 1884. The House then fell into decay and John Birmingham's large and valuable library was scattered and left to rot. Of all his possessions and papers, only his telescope survived.

John Birmingham's unfinished revision and updating of the "Red Star Catalogue" was completed by a Yorkshire amateur astronomer, the Rev. Thomas Espin.  The 2nd edition of the Catalogue published in 1888 proved a work of acclaimed and lasting value to the international community of astronomers. As a 'Tuam News' obituarist declared, John Birmingham was "super siderus notus". Today, if his light is not seen it is less that it has been extinguished than that the eye of history is been averted.

Birmingham Crater on Moon

BIRMINGHAM.-- A large rhomboidal-shaped enclosure, defined by mountain chains and traversed by a number of very remarkable parallel ridges. It is situated nearly due N. of Plato on the N. edge of the Mare Frigoris, and lies on the S.W. side of W.C. Bond, to which it bears a certain resemblance. This region is characterised by the parallelism displayed by many formations, large and small. It is more apparent hereabouts than in any other part of the moon's visible surface. When favourably placed under a low morning sun, Birmingham is a striking telescopic object.

Additional Information

• Westfall, 2000: 0.83 km
• Cherrington, 1969: 1.7 km

Central peak height: 0.3 km

Other interior peak heights

• 0.2 km: "A peak standing on the south of a small crater, Birmingham G."
• 0.2 km: "An oblong hill at the south-westerly part of the floor"