Special Powers – Frank McNally with more on the origins of a famous Hollywood name

You'll have heard the old Irish phrase "Beidh lá eile ag an bPaorach" ("Power will have another day"). It's said to date from 1798 and to have been first uttered by one Edmund Power, from Dungarvan. Since when, it has served as an expression of defiance for the temporarily defeated, meaning "We live to fight another day".

Not that the prediction was strictly true in the case of Power, who uttered it on the gallows just before he was hanged.

Anyway, in similar spirit, I return to the subject of Hollywood actor Tyrone Power (Irishman's Diary, July 21st) and his unwitting part in attaching the name of an Ulster county to several generations of baby boys, mostly in Britain and America. One of the phenomenon's oddities is that it seems to have little to do with Tyrone itself, and more with Waterford, where Tyrone Power's namesake grandfather (1795-1841), the patriarch of a theatrical dynasty, was born.

According to the 1908 edition of Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography, his father had been “a member of a well-to-do Waterford family”.

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And although the DNB did not see fit to name him, it seems notable that the most aristocratic family in those parts has long been the “de la Poer Beresfords”, the head of which is traditionally “Lord Waterford”, but only after serving his heirship as “Lord Tyrone”, a courtesy title of complicated origin.

Perhaps there were actual Tyrone people involved at some point. But the protagonist of a once-famous ghost story involving the family was a woman from Co Down, Nichola-Sophia Hamilton, who married into it in the late 17th century.

Orphaned in childhood, she had been raised alongside another orphan, Lord Tyrone, by a person of unorthodox religious belief. Under this influence, the two young people made a pact that if whichever of them died first discovered there was an afterlife, he or she would report back from it to the other.

And so it came to pass that one night in her 20s, the former Miss Hamilton, now Lady Beresford, had a dream in which Lord Tyrone visited her from the next world, where he was recently arrived. As well as informing her of his premature death, he told her she was pregnant and, less happily, that she would die in her 47th year, still distant then.

In classic occult style, he also touched her wrist, so that when she woke next morning she found a black mark there, henceforth covered with a ribbon. After that, she awaited confirmation in the post that Lord Tyrone was indeed dead. Her pregnancy was similarly confirmed. Then the years passed until, after a particularly nervous one, she hosted a party to celebrate her 47th birthday, a milestone that seemed to mean she had defied the gloomy prediction.

As connoisseurs of 18th-century ghost stories will not need to be told, however, there had been a miscalculation. Having rechecked the parish register, a clergyman announced the happy news that Lady B had been born a year earlier than previously thought and was only 46. Ashen-faced, she excused herself from the party and expired quietly soon afterwards.

The name of the original Tyrone Power seems therefore have been a semi-aristocratic confection. But despite his well-to-do father, the young actor had to struggle for a time before becoming the leading professional Irishman on the London stage.

That was a competitive field then. His first attempt at one of the stock characters, "Looney Mactwolter", was judged a failure. Several years of bit parts later, he was somewhat more successful in another classic role "Larry Hoolagan". But his big break came when London's leading Irish comedian, Charles Connor, "died suddenly of apoplexy" in 1826. Power replaced him and never looked back. His later Looney Mactwolters were much praised.

The heyday was a short one, alas. In March 1841, aged 44, he travelled to America on the newly built steamship President, then the world’s largest passenger vessel. It was the Titanic of its day in more ways than one. On only its third ocean crossing, it disappeared in a storm, along with all on board.

But speaking of presidents, and to end on a more cheerful note, I’m reminded of a story from a party Eamon de Valera once gave in Áras an Uachtaráin for political correspondents of the national newspapers.

Before his speech, guests had been served a glass of whiskey – John Power’s, naturally. And when he finished, the butler moved to refill glasses. But de Valera was an austere man, who also knew well the dangers of mixing whiskey with journalists. There would be no more drinking that night. He stayed the butler’s hand, and the Power’s, with an immortal pun: “Beidh lá eile ag an bPaorach.”