Brendan Behan

Born in 1923, Brendan Behan grew up in a tenement block in Dublin's north inner city. He attended school until the age of 14 and subsequently began an apprenticeship to become a house-painter like his father. In 1937, he joined the IRA. Two years later, his attempt to plant a bomb in the Liverpool dockyards was thwarted when he was arrested just hours after his arrival. A minor, Behan was sentenced to three years in the Borstal detention centre at Hollesley Bay, but was deported early to Ireland in 1941. The experience was to inspire his later autobiographical work, Borstal Boy (1958). Following his attempt to shoot a police officer at the Easter Commemoration a year later, he was sentenced to 14 years' penal servitude. Of these, he served only four before he was released in the general IRA Amnesty of 1946. Later spells in prison were to follow. His breakthrough as a writer came with the play The Quare Fellow, first produced by the Dublin Pike Theatre in 1954. Two years later, it was produced by Joan Littlewood's company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. Behan's next play, The Hostage (1958), was his own translation of his Irish play An Giall; it was produced not only at the West End, but also on Broadway and on many European stages. Behan also wrote several radio plays, among them The Big House for the BBC, and a collection of his pieces for the Irish Press appeared as Hold Your Hour and Have Another in 1963. Suffering from Diabetes, compounded by years of heavy drinking, Brendan Behan died in Dublin in 1964, aged 41.