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Letter from William Dawson (1864-1950) to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946) expressing sympathy in regards to the death of Hanna's husband, Francis. Dawson also writes of his respect and affection for Francis. William Richard Dawson was appointed Inspector of Lunatics in Ireland in 1911. During the Great War he served in the Royal Ambulance Medical Corps, gaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel, as a specialist in ‘nerve disease’ or shell shock to the troops in Ireland. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, suffragette, nationalist, language teacher, was the founder of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and a founding member of the Irish Women Workers’ Union. She was the widow of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington who was summarily executed on 26 April 1916. She was active during the Rising, bringing food to the Volunteers in the G.P.O. and the College of Surgeons. Four days passed before she found out what had happened to her husband, Francis (1878-1916), and it wasn't until almost two weeks later that the full details of his execution emerged.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).