OBITUARY

This is the original obituary from: The Tuam Herald,
Saturday July 6 1968

Since this obituary was written further research into Liam's life and times have revealed and clarified details of his life which were not available at the time.

Mr Liam T. Langley

Late of Tuam

   The death of Mr. Liam T Langley, which occurred on June 21st at his residence, ‘Glenealy’, 23 Blackheath Park, Clontarf, Dublin, severs one of the last Tuam links with the 1916 Rising.  The number of people now left in the town who remember him is comparatively small, but here surely was a man whose name can be recalled with pride.  For Liam Langley had given a lifetime of devoted service to the national cause, and was friend and confidant of many whose names stand high in our country’s roll of honour.  “It wasn’t from the wind he took it,” for he was born with a Fenian heritage that he carried from childhood through the length of years.

   Though he always regarded Tuam as his home town, Liam Langley was born in Sydney, Australia, on January 23rd, 1888, and was only four years old when he first came to the land of his fathers.  It was homecoming too for his father, Michael Langley, a native of Caltra, Ballinasloe, who had to flee “down under” a a hunted felon after the abortive Fenian Rising of 1848.  While in Sydney, he married and raised a large family, and owned a book shop in the city.  Some years after the death of his first wife, he married Mary Kavanagh, daughter of emigrants from Co. Wicklow, both of whom had died and been buried at sea on the long voyage to Australia.  Liam was the only child of that marriage and in 1892 they returned to Ireland and came to live in Tuam.  In a thatched cottage on the Cloonthue Road, Liam Langley learnt the Fenian tradition from his father, whose brother Charles had been hanged outside his own house in Clastleblakeney in April, 1820, for organising the Ribbonmen in the area.