He arrives in Telemachus, terrifies his roommates with dreams of a black panther, and appears completely out of place. For readers of Ulysses, Haines is a figure of mockery – but the man behind the character led a life far more complex and tragic.

A Ponderous Saxon

When Ulysses opens in the Martello Tower at Sandycove, the first figure we meet is Buck Mulligan. The second is Stephen Dedalus. The third is Haines, an Englishman studying Irish folklore, obsessed with the language and entrenched in his own perception of what it means to be Irish.

Most of Joyce’s contemporaries and scholars have pointed to the real-life inspiration of Haines being Samuel Chenevix Trench. The parallels are hard to ignore: Anglo-Irish background, Oxford education, interest in the Gaelic Revival and, most tellingly, he resided in the notorious Martello tower with Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty.

Origins

Richard Samuel Chenevix Trench was born on 8 October 1881 at Cahir barracks in County Tipperary.¹ Known as Samuel, he was the first-born son of Frederick Chenevix Trench – the Lieutenant Colonel of the 20^th Hussars garrisoned at the barracks, having previously participated in the siege and capture of both Delhi and Lucknow.²

The Trench family ranked among the Anglo-Irish gentry – Protestant descendants of English settlers who often held power over Ireland’s Catholic majority. Of Huguenot descent via England, they held considerable influence through their accumulation of various titles such as Lord Clancarty and Baron Ashtown. This influence crossed into religion, with Samuel’s grandfather, Richard Chenevix Trench, serving as the Church of Ireland’s Archbishop of Dublin.

Soon after Samuel’s birth, his father commenced service as the military attaché in Saint Petersburg.³ He retired in 1887 and tried his hand at business, though reports suggest that things didn’t go in his favour. In August 1894 in Braemar, Scotland, Frederick Chenevix Trench was found dead on a hill near his lodgings.⁴ Accounts conflict on the cause. Some newspapers suggest that it was suicide, driven by financial losses,⁵ while others state that it was from heart failure.⁴ No official cause of death was found during the inquest, being put down on his death registration as “unknown”.

Stemming from his father’s death, the 12-year-old Samuel Chenevix Trench was granted annuity payments of £44 (£4,292 in 2025) until the day he turned 19.⁶

The Making of an Irishman

Trench entered Eton College in 1895 and graduated in 1900.⁷ He then enrolled in Balliol College at the University of Oxford.⁸ Though having lived in England for most of his life, Trench joined Oxford’s St. Patrick’s Club – a society that gave weekly Irish classes. It was here that he met a young medical student – Oliver St. John Gogarty.⁹ Trench became a zealous advocate of the language to the point where, according to Gogarty, he would search for men around the University who had any connection to Ireland and teach them Irish at his rooms in the Holywell campus.¹⁰

Three Men in a Tower

By 1904, Trench was firmly in the throes of his birth country’s culture, embarking on a canoeing tour of the island.¹¹ Around this point, his collegemate Gogarty had rented a Martello tower in Sandycove, along the coast of south Dublin, and invited Trench to stay before he returned to Oxford to complete his final term.

Trench arrived at the tower on the 10^th of September, joining Gogarty and his other friend, James Joyce. Joyce gave Trench his bed by the door.¹⁰ In the short amount of time that had elapsed, word had spread around the area about the motley crew in the tower, as they were paid a visit by a man cycling with his friend from Bray to Dublin – William Bulfin. He would later memorialise this visit in his book, Rambles in Eirinn.¹¹

Bulfin chatted with the trio, staying longer than anticipated. He described Trench as:

“… an Oxford student, whose button-hole was adorned by the badge of the Gaelic League – a most strenuous Nationalist he was, with a patriotism, stronger than circumstances, which moved him to pour forth fluent Irish upon every Gael he encountered, in accents blent from the characteristic speech of his alma mater and the rolling bias of Connacht.”

According to Gogarty, one night, a few days after Bulfin’s visit, the trio were sleeping. Trench woke up with a startle, yelling, “The black panther!” before taking a revolver from under his pillow and firing two shots at the fire grate. He then went back to sleep. Gogarty sneaked over and took the gun from Trench.

Later, Trench woke up again screaming; Gogarty said, “Leave the menagerie to me”, and shot the gun at the tin cans on the shelf above Joyce, sending them raining down on him. At this moment, Joyce, in Gogarty’s words, put on his frayed trousers and shirt, took his ash plant and left the tower in the dead of the night towards Dublin city.¹²

It should be noted that Gogarty was oftentimes an unreliable narrator, complicated by Joyce never having publicly commented on his time in the tower. This reveals itself in Gogarty’s claim of who Joyce blamed for the shooting. In his first autobiography, Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove, he lays the responsibility on Trench,¹² though in It Isn’t This Time of Year at All, published six years later, Gogarty states that he himself was blamed for it.¹⁰ Regardless, tensions were evidently fraught between the pair at this point, with Stanislaus Joyce noting in his diary that “Gogarty wants to put Joyce out”.¹³

Trench and Gogarty stayed on in the tower for another month before the former returned to Oxford to complete his final term. Trench’s departure in mid-October seemed abrupt to Gogarty. In a letter to his friend, George Kennedy Allen Bell, he remarked how Trench could not “sympathize with my Boeotian existence in the Tower”.

However, it appears that Trench had taken a memento, with Gogarty later writing to Bell complaining that his chryselephantine shaving brush had now gone missing and he would write to Balliol asking for it back. With his temporary departure from Ireland, Trench would live at 190 Ebury Street in London.¹⁴

Becoming Dermot

As noted by Bulfin, Trench was a member of the Gaelic League – an organisation established with the primary goal of preserving the Irish language amid centuries of British suppression. Now back in Ireland, Trench devoted himself entirely to the Gaelic revival and the League. This included a role on the Propagandist Committee – being tasked with finding guest speakers for meetings nationwide.¹⁵

Members of the Gaelic League were often referred to by their Gaelicised names. With ‘Samuel’ lacking an Irish equivalent, and Risteárd not exotic enough, Trench adopted the additional name of ‘Dermot’ by deed poll in March 1905.¹⁶

Like many others, Trench’s Gaelic League involvement spilled over into the theatre scene in Dublin, becoming a member of the Abbey Theatre and starring in numerous plays. In 1906, unhappy with the Abbey Theatre’s decision to be turned into a limited company, a new group broke away, called the Theatre of Ireland. Founding members included Padraic Colum, Thomas Kettle and Padraig Pearse.¹⁷

The Use of Reviving Irish

Throughout 1907, Trench was working on a pamphlet titled What is the Use of Reviving Irish? Published that October and running a little over thirty pages long, it outlines his interpretation of the Gaelic League’s ideals at a time when the organisation was in an ideological flux. While originally conceived as apolitical, the League was becoming increasingly shaped by younger nationalists bearing revolutionary sympathies, such as Padraig Pearse and Eoin MacNeill.

Trench’s pamphlet straddles both sides. While his tone is impassioned and idealistic, he avoids overt political rhetoric. Yet his vision for the League extends well beyond linguistic preservation.  He describes Irish as “the language of a social genius”, capable of setting in motion “the genial current of soul that has become frozen in an Anglicised atmosphere.”

He romanticises the Irish-speaking peasantry in a way that mirrors the Anglo-Irish Hibernophile tradition of a mythic, rural Ireland – akin to Yeats and Synge. “No one could meet the peasantry,” he writes, “without being struck by the vigour of mind, the refinement of mind, the genuine literary culture which place them far above the inhabitants of the anglicised districts.”¹⁸

Charged with idealism, Trench’s pamphlet blends spiritual nationalism with romanticism – arguing that to speak Irish is to be Irish. In equating the Irish language with Irish identity, Trench was not just advancing a cultural argument – he was also, perhaps, justifying his own place within it.

Meet the Synthetic Gaels

The notion of identity-by-language touches on what Warre B. Wells termed the “Synthetic Gael” – a type of hyper-nationalist outsider, often Anglo-Irish by background, whose fervour for Irish culture could seem performative or overcompensatory. Writing in 1922, Wells described them as people who “habitually murdered Gaelic with an Oxford accent.”¹⁹ The novelist Elizabeth Bowen, then living in Folkestone with her cousins Cesca and Margot Chenevix Trench, observed how “nationality showed itself” as they walked about town “in Celtic robes of scarlet or green, with Tara brooches clamped to their shoulders.” Her mother reportedly remarked that “no Trenches were ever so Irish as all that.”²⁰

What looked like theatre, in Cesca and Margot’s case, became a lifelong political commitment. While drafting his pamphlet, ‘Dermot’ Trench began teaching his cousins Irish.²¹ In time, both sisters left England permanently to settle in Ireland, where they joined the Gaelic League, took part in Cumann na mBan (with Margot serving jail time) and became active in Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise, which sought to root the Church of Ireland in the national revival.

It’s this tension that made Trench such rich inspiration for Joyce. As Aaron Kelly puts it, Haines is “the cultural imperialist for whom the Irish language becomes another of his accumulated cultural treasures while simultaneously being denied any living currency among Irish people themselves.”²² The critique is sharp and not without merit – especially when directed at those who wore the trappings of Irishness without ever letting go of their colonial privilege.

Erratic & Neurotic

Those close to Trench had long noted his mental health struggles. Gogarty, in a 1904 letter from the Martello tower, wrote that Trench was “delightful: erratic and neurotic, but this latter is getting better with the sea air.” Less than a year later, however, he confessed he was afraid Trench might one day “shoot himself in a fit of despondency at the futility of his labours—pamphlets etc.”¹⁴ Trench was also referenced in an unpublished poem: “And lifted from his dismal state / That Oxford man disconsolate.”⁹

According to his classmate from Eton, Stephen Hobhouse, Trench was “very gifted but unhappy”, suffering from what he called “acute melancholia and neurasthenia” due to his family environment – potentially referring to his father and a hereditary depression. Friends noted he spoke openly, and too easily, about ending his life.²³

His emotional fragility may have been compounded by illness. Accounts suggest that his depression deepened after a bout of influenza,²⁴ potentially afflicting what we now know today as post-viral depression. Padraic Colum, a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival who had met Trench in Dublin’s theatre scene, would later label him “manic-depressive”.²⁵ From the outside, it may have looked like eccentricity, though to friends, it looked more perilous.

A Return to Oxford

By the end of 1908, the momentum that had carried Trench through his years in Ireland began to wane. He returned to England to continue his legal training from where he left off at King’s Inn. There, he studied for the Bar at Oxford.

At the urging of Stephen Hobhouse, he also took up residence for a time at Toynbee Hall, the pioneering settlement house in East London founded to bridge social divides between the working poor and university-educated reformers. Hobhouse later recalled that Trench “went to live at Toynbee Hall and took some useful part in the work of the Settlement.”²³ It was, perhaps, a last attempt to ground himself in a moral and social purpose, echoing the idealism that had drawn him to the Gaelic League.

Though physically removed from Ireland, Trench’s heart had not quite departed. In March 1909, he made a small but telling gesture – a five-shilling donation to the memorial fund for Mícheál Breathnach, the recently deceased Irish-language writer.²⁶ Even as his world contracted, he remained connected to the revivalist cause he had once thrown himself into so completely.

“How Hard I Have Fought”

In the time he wasn’t studying for the Bar, Trench visited his friend, Nathaniel Sears, who was staying at Orpington House in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. While his mental health had shown signs of improvement, he remained burdened by emotional and intellectual unrest. His law examinations loomed, and he had been rejected by Mary Spring Rice – a titled Irish nationalist and sister of Thomas Spring Rice, whom Trench had known from Oxford.¹⁴

On the evening of Monday, 31 May 1909, Trench appeared to be in good spirits. He and Sears spent the evening together and Trench’s conversation was said to have been rational, even cheerful.²⁴ There was no outward indication of what was to come. Around 9:45pm, he went to bed in a small bungalow on the grounds of the house.

The following morning, Sears found Trench lying in bed, with blood pooled under his head. In his left hand he clutched a five-chambered revolver, the barrel having been placed against his left ear. The bullet passed through his brain and exited from his forehead. Death was instant.

Trench left behind a note, found in a drawer beside the bed:

“If anything happens to me will you tell my uncle how ill I was, how hard I have fought for years, and how worried I have been lest I should have done something dishonourable as regards that girl?”

At the inquest held later that week, Colonel Charles Chenevix Trench, to whom the note was addressed, stated that the incident was one he had dreaded for years. A medical advisor had long ago warned the family that Trench stood on the brink of insanity.²⁴

The jury ruled it suicide, committed while temporarily insane. Trench was 27 years old.

Clay, Brown, Damp

Trench was buried on the 5^th of June 1909 in Brompton Cemetery in London.²⁷ His grave lies beneath a weathered grey headstone – a tall, austere monument – though the Celtic cross has broken off and lies toppled at its foot. The inscription has faded, flaking visibly from the stone. Outside of the Celtic cross, there are no Gaelic flourishes, no mottos, no nationalist emblems. Fittingly or not, it bears no sign of the cultural battlefields Trench had once devoted himself to.

Probate was granted later that year in Dublin.²⁸ The value of Trench’s estate was listed as £6,816 12s 9d – a substantial sum in a city where the daily wage of a bricklayer was just 77d.²⁹

All the Living and the Dead

In Ulysses, Haines is a figure of satire: the “ponderous Saxon” with an interest in the Irish language that seems more aesthetic than lived. He speaks Irish imperfectly and offers up nationalist platitudes. He is an outsider with curiosity, but no real belonging. To many readers, he is a parody of the Anglo-Irish romantic – well-meaning, but misplaced.

Yet Trench was more than a literary caricature. His friend, Stephen Hobhouse, remembered him as a deeply thoughtful man. Writing years later, Hobhouse called his friendship with “Sammy” the “most intimate one” of his youth, and suggested that Trench’s death precluded an even greater sacrifice:

“He would probably otherwise have perished with James Connolly and Padraic Pearse in the bloody Dublin insurrection of Easter 1916” Hobhouse, the noted pacifist, wrote²³ – placing him not just among idealists, but among martyrs – albeit it is likely Hobhouse didn’t view them as such.

The unanswered question is whether Trench would have embraced such a path in the seismic shift that occurred in Irish history in the years following his death. Was he just a dreamer tethered to ideals, or would he have taken up arms if needed? He was, after all, a socialist and a Gaelic Leaguer, though at the same time, he had never fully severed himself from his Anglo-Irish upbringing and the luxuries it brought him. There is always a danger of reading too much into the silences left by suicide – and just as much in forgetting entirely.

Perhaps the final word should belong to Padraic Colum, who knew Trench in life and lamented how Joyce had recast him in fiction:²⁵

“As I knew him and as my friends of the time knew him, he was helpful, disinterested, visionary. I hope there is a record of him somewhere, beyond the anecdote I have set down here, to distinguish him from the Haines of Ulysses.”

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