Biography
Other info : Bibliography
Arthur Alfred Lynch was an Irish Australian civil engineer, physician, journalist, author, soldier, anti-imperialist and polymath. He served as MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and represented Galway Borough from 1901 to 1902, subsequently West Clare from 1909 to 1918. Unlike most of his compatriots, Lynch fought on the Boer side during the Boer War, in South Africa and raised his own Irish battalion towards the end of World War I.
Lynch was born at Smythesdale near Ballarat, Victoria, the fourth of 14 children. His father, John Lynch, was an Irish Catholic surveyor and civil engineer and his mother Isabella (née MacGregor) was Scottish.[1] John Lynch was a founder and first president of the Ballarat School of Mines, and a captain of Peter Lalor at the Eureka Stockade rebellion (1854) and John Lynch wrote a book, Austral Light (1893–94), about it – later republished as The Story of the Eureka Stockade.[1]
Arthur Lynch was educated at Grenville College, Ballarat, (where he was "entranced" by differential calculus) and the University of Melbourne, where he took the degrees of BA in 1885 and MA in 1887.[1] Lynch qualified as a civil engineer and practised this profession for a short period in Melbourne.
Lynch left Australia and went to Berlin, where he studied physics, physiology and psychology at the University of Berlin in 1888-89. he had a particular respect for Hermann von Helmholtz. Moving to London, Lynch took up journalism. In 1892, he contested Galway as a Parnellite candidate, but was defeated.[1]
Lynch met Annie Powell (daughter of the Rev. John D. Powell) in Berlin and they were married in 1895. They were to have no children. In Lynch's words, the marriage "never lost its happiness" (My Life Story, p. 85).
In 1898, he was Paris correspondent for the London Daily Mail.[1]
Lynch wrote and published a large number of books ranging from poetry, to a sophisticated attempt to refute Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. His verse was clever and satirically Byronic, and his essays and studies show much reading and acuteness of mind. E. Morris Miller,
himself a professor of philosophy, mentions Lynch's "high reputation as
a critical and philosophical writer especially for his contributions to
psychology and ethics" (Australian Literature, p. 273)
