Brady-Browne family honours a past master

The 75th anniversary of Captain Thomas Henry Brady-Browne’s death was commemorated at the Quakerstown point-to-point races recently. The Tulla man was master of hounds with the Clare Hunt after the reorganisation of the hunt in 1925.
The Brady-Browne Memorial Race commemorated Captain Brady-Browne, the last member of the family to live at Newgrove House in Tulla. The captain had served as an officer in the Clare Artillery from 1900 to 1913 and in France during the First World War but died tragically in 1937 at Clonmoney Races.
He was riding in the Clare Hunt point-to-point at Clonmoney when he suffered a heart attack during the first race and died after falling from his horse, Lord Francis.
The Brady-Browne family were accomplished riders and Captain Brady-Browne’s nephew, Thomas Cullinan, won the Aintree Grand National in 1930 on Shaun Goilín.
Captain Brady-Browne was a keen horseman himself and was a regular in the winner’s enclosure at the Clare Hunt races. His brother, Windham, also featured in the Clare Hunt races, often riding for well-known local breeders the MacMahons of Newmarket House.
Captain Brady-Browne’s funeral was one of the largest seen in Clare and it was reported that as the funeral party arrived at the church in Tulla, the last of the cortège was only leaving Newgrove, three miles away.
Following the funeral, a fund was set up by local members of the hunt to provide for the captain’s family.
Following Captain Brady-Browne’s death, his wife Mabel left the house at Newgrove and moved to live with relatives in County Antrim. Some descendants of the family still live in Clare, while others live in Dublin, England and Canada. Jimmo Quinn, Claremount, Clarecastle, succeeded the captain as master of the hunt.
In 1938, a memorial race was added to the card of the Clare Hunt meeting for a perpetual cup, presented by Walter Chapman.
This inaugural race was won by Frank Quinn on A O’Gorman’s horse, Rusty Dusty. The horse was strongly fancied, having previously won the Irish Grand National. Quinn repeated his success the following two years, on Claremount (owned by Michael Lyons) in 1939, and on Peter (owned by BF Kerrison) in 1940. The race has remained a feature of the point-to-point and as 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of the captain’s death, special tribute was paid to him when his last surviving child, Edmund Brady-Browne, and 23 of his family members came from Clare, Dublin, England and Germany to commemorate him at the Quakerstown Races on Easter Sunday.