Robert Jones O’Keeffe – “we never had occasion to reprove him for any unseemly conduct.”

Robert Jones O’Keeffe (1811-75) was an Irishman who lost his hearing aged 2 ½ we are told, when he fell into a lake (Smith, 1875, from which what follows is taken).  His portrait was painted by Thomas Davidson, and the engraving here was made from that by Arthur Wilson (see previous posts).

O’Keeffe claimed to be descended from this Arthur O’Keeffe whose memorial is in Westminster Abbey.  He told Davidson that his father was an officer, later working in the ‘stamp office’ in Dublin, while an uncle was he said killed at Waterloo.  One of his brothers ran away to sea and was never again heard of, while another, a barrister, died of ‘some affection of the throat’ (ibid).

He said his aunt was the mother of Cardinal Wiseman, which would mean she was Xaviera Strange suggesting that his mother’s maiden name was Strange.  He claimed that the Cardinal’s father had told him he was sending him to Rome when ‘to be educated for a priest’, yet Wiseman’s father died in 1805 before O’Keeffe was born (unless his aunt married again?).  However the young Robert was educated we are told, at the Protestant School in Dublin, under (so Samuel Smith thinks) Mr. Humphreys.  Later he went to work at a mail coach factory, but after 15 years in 1843 he came with his widowed mother to London, working for Cubitt’s – Willam rather than Thomas – at 37 Gray’s Inn Road, not far from our library.  It seems William had known Robert’s father and uncle (perhaps from his time as a carpenter in the navy we might speculate).

Robert worked there for 32 years, then was partly paralysed, yet was not allowed a pension despite the best efforts of Samuel Smith, as after William Cubitt died (1863) the business changed hands and the new management were obviously not particularly sympathetic.

In his obituary, Samuel Smith wrote of O’Keeffe,

On our last visit to him before his death, we asked him if he was afraid to die. He shook his head, being too weak to talk on his fingers. We urged him to “look to Jesus.” […] he had been a communicant many years, and had seemed earnestly attentive to the religious instruction given at our services, and we never had occasion to reprove him for any unseemly conduct.

One wonders who the Rev. Samuel Smith did have to reprove!

He started attending BDDA run services as an attendant at lectures and received a small stipend as a result of that, really a an act of charity.  He married a deaf widow, Mary Ann Dobell, who was a little older than him, in 1853 (Marriages Jun 1853, Dobell Mary Newington 1d 236).  She was born in Sevenoaks and I wonder if she was a pupil at the Old Kent Road Asylum.  It should not be too difficult to find her maiden name – one possibility is either Mary Ann Gough or Mary Ann Leech one of whom married a Henry Dobell (Marriages Sep 1838, Wandsworth 4 449), but that is a guess and requires a bit more research.

Samuel Smith (as ‘Ed’), Robert Jones O’Keeffe, A Magazine Intended Chiefly for the Deaf and Dumb, 1875 Vol.3, No.28, p.53-4

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