Born: 31 May 1830, United Kingdom
Died: 29 January 1925
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Angela Byrne. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Galwey, Honoria Tomkins (1830–1925) was born in Derry city on 31 May 1830, the fourth of nine children of Rev. Charles Galwey (1792–1882) of Co. Limerick and Honoria (‘Norah’) Tomkins Knox (c. 1800–81), daughter of Colonel Andrew Knox MP of Prehen, Co. Derry. Her siblings were Mary (1823–1916), William (1828–76), Isabella Frances (1832–1910), Andrew Knox (1835–1903), Caroline Jane Benjamina (1838–1934), Charles Richard (1840–94), John (1843–65), and Lydia (b. 1826) who died in infancy. Charles Galwey arrived in Derry in 1820 as junior curate of the cathedral under Thomas Gough, dean of Derry. He and Norah married in Glendermott church, Co. Derry, on 9 April 1822. The Galweys moved to Gortgowan, Moville, Co. Donegal, when Charles was made rector there in 1831. Galwey and her siblings were educated at home and enjoyed a happy childhood, despite the impact of the tithe wars on the family’s income and security. In April 1832 the windows of their home were smashed and her father’s agent was attacked while attempting to collect tithes; the non-payment of tithes led the family to experience some financial difficulty. Despite this, the Galweys had a good relationship with the locals. Charles Galwey supported Catholic emancipation and, as secretary of the Lower Moville Relief Committee, was active in local relief efforts during the Great Famine.
In January 1853 the family relocated to the parish of Lower Badoney, Co. Tyrone, before returning to Derry in 1860, where Charles had been offered the position of archdeacon. Galwey and her unmarried sister Isabella Frances were active in Derry’s philanthropic and cultural circles in the 1870s, attending the annual examinations at the Model School, participating in St Columb’s choir, visiting the city infirmary, and subscribing to charitable causes in the city and its Donegal hinterland. Galwey was closely associated during this time with the hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the bishop of Derry. She seems to have continued to live with her parents until their deaths in 1881 and 1882, and she may have travelled on the Continent during this time. After the deaths of their parents, Galwey and Isabella Frances moved to Dublin. They lived at 5 Earlsfort Terrace, a property owned by Alexandra College, where Isabella Frances – and possibly Honoria – worked as ‘lady resident’, overseeing the care and discipline of the students. Galwey had returned to live in Moville – a lively port and market town – by 1896.
Galwey came to prominence as a folk music collector in the 1890s, but had been collecting privately since childhood. As early as four years of age she received music instruction from her older sister Mary, and from infancy she learned folk songs and airs from her nurse, Mary Cooke (née McGarvey). Cooke worked for the family from around 1828 and, despite ending her employment with them on her marriage to their gardener, Jamie Cooke, in 1840, continued to live on the grounds at Gortgowan and followed the family throughout their relocations to Co. Tyrone and to Derry. On Cooke’s death in Moville on 20 March 1882, Galwey and her siblings erected a headstone in St Finian’s churchyard, Greencastle, Co. Donegal; Galwey later published several airs she learned from Cooke.
As a teenager, Galwey sought out folk music at Moville’s quarterly fairs, committing the tunes to memory and humming them to her father. She collected songs and airs from the sailors and others living in or passing through Moville, and from locally renowned musicians including the fiddlers Hudy McCann and Paddy ‘the Slithers’, and the piper Tom Gordon. While it is possible that Galwey had basic or conversational Irish, all the lyrics she collected were in English (though she indicated an ability to speak Irish on her 1901 census return, she did not do so in 1911).
Galwey came to public notice as a folk music collector in May 1897, when several of her songs and tunes were anthologised in songwriter Alfred Perceval Graves’s and composer Charles Wood’s Irish folk-songs. A reviewer for the Evening Herald described Galwey as ‘a lady who is not only herself intensely imbued with the spirit of the Gael, but … has been able to record many beautiful airs in their primitive form’ (28 May 1897). Graves was the first to put new lyrics to the airs Galwey collected, and they remained in contact for many years.
In the following years Galwey’s tunes were published in the Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society and were collected in both Charles Villiers Stanford’s The national song book: a complete collection of the folk-songs, carols, and rounds suggested by the Board of Education (1905) and Patrick Weston Joyce’s authoritative Old Irish folk music and songs (1909). Several of her tunes were published as broadsides between 1903 and 1923, mostly by the international music publisher Boosey & Co., with arrangements by Villiers Stanford, Arthur Somervell, R. Arthur Oulton, James Armstrong and Mary Tomlinson, and with lyrics by Moira O’Neill, Winifred Mabel Letts and Barbara Frances Stuart.
Galwey’s greatest contribution was her own collection, Old Irish croonauns, published by Boosey & Co. in 1910. The contents ranged from traditional Donegal airs to parlour tunes, from lullabies to stirring reels, accompanied by brief but careful notes acknowledging her sources and any previously published variations. The collection demonstrated the extent of Galwey’s knowledge and the breadth of her sources – as well as oral/aural sources, she included five airs from Burk Thumoth’s Twelve Scotch and twelve Irish airs: with variations set for the German flute, violin or harpsichord (c. 1742), then out of print and not widely available.
Galwey’s songs and airs were popular – particularly those that had been set to new arrangements and given new lyrics – and were performed in concert halls across Ireland and Britain. Favourites included ‘Hey ho! The morning dew’, which was performed at the 1898 feis ceoil in Belfast by the Dublin singer and pianist Ida Elsener, and the hugely popular ‘Over here’ (also known as ‘Famine song’). Her songs were performed at concerts promoting Irish culture by the likes of Russian violinist Adolph Davidovich Brodsky, Irish baritone Harry Plunket Greene and English singer Lady Maud Warrender.
In addition to her work as a folk music collector, Galwey was also a noted naturalist. Between 1875 and 1895 she assisted the naturalist and literary scholar Henry Chichester Hart with his research on Donegal’s marine biology, folklore and dialect. Galwey also provided Hart with Inishowen folklore and traditions, some of which he published in his books and articles. He cited her contributions to his published work, but additional, unpublished material remains among Hart’s papers in Trinity College Dublin, including additional verses to ‘A valentine’ (one of which was published in Michael Traynor’s The English dialect of Donegal without crediting Galwey). The papers also contain important variations on her published songs ‘Willie the sailor’, ‘My boy Thady’ and ‘The little boat’ (commonly known as ‘My boy Willie’).
Galwey was elected a member of the Conchological Society at its meeting of 7 April 1887 – its seventh female member – after reading a paper on the shells of Magilligan strand which was published in the society’s journal. (Her membership seems to have ended in 1890.) She may have been influenced in this respect by her father; he originally studied medicine before realising he lacked the stomach for surgery, and when his children were young he dabbled in inventing. As a child Galwey sailed the Foyle in the family’s boat, she had for much of her life ready access to the shore, and she kept a cabinet of shells in her home. Hart credited Galwey with sending him a shell specimen and cited her work on Magilligan’s shells in an article he published on Donegal’s marine Mollusca in The Zoologist in 1892. Her article was also cited in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1898–1900) alongside the pioneering Irish women marine biologists Ellen Hutchins, Emily Lawless and Annie Letitia Massy. In 1909 Galwey published A book of remembrance of our dear ones at rest with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge – a book of days, with prayers and bible quotes for every day of the year. Her personal manuscript copy, in which she recorded dates of death of loved ones from 1906 onwards, is held at St Columb’s cathedral, Derry.
Galwey returned to live in Derry c. 1911, at 6 St Columb’s Close, a house provided by the Church of Ireland, adjacent to the cathedral entrance. She remained there until her death on 29 January 1925 of cardiac artheria and ‘senile decay’. She was buried on 31 January 1925 alongside her parents in City cemetery, Derry, and left an estate of £600 6s. 6d., of which she left £100 to her ‘attendant’ Margaret Hynes (a catholic servant recorded as living with Galwey in the 1911 census).
The later years of Galwey’s life are not well documented, but she continued to play the piano at home until just a month before her death. (Her Broadwood piano was auctioned off, along with the rest of her belongings, within a fortnight of her death.) Though obituaries lauded her contributions to the preservation and promotion of Irish folk music, Galwey’s name quickly fell into obscurity – a process likely expedited by her position as the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman and a signatory of the Ulster covenant. Her niece Dorothea Galwey provided information to the folk-music collector Sam Henry, but Galwey’s collection languished, relatively unnoticed, until recently. In 2019 Inishowen Traditional Music Project commissioned the ‘Inishowen’ suite, which incorporated some of the airs Galwey collected and was performed at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, in January 2023, and produced a documentary film, Between two worlds: Honoria Galwey | a portrait, in 2025.