W. F. P. Stockley's grandfather, William Stockley (1776–1860), a veterinary surgeon in the Royal Horse Artillery from 1805 to 1858 and President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, lived in Corkagh, Clondalkin, County Dublin, until 1837, after which he served in Canada and later lived out his life in London. The Stockleys were a Protestant family and W. F. P. Stockley had been raised in that faith before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1894.[3]
Academic
Stockley took a senior moderatorship in modern literature at Trinity College Dublin, where his classmates included Douglas Hyde, and graduated in 1883 with a BA in English and French.[3]
He was president of the Cork Literary and Scientific Society from 1913 to 1915 and President of the Cork Library Committee from 1913 to 1930.
He was author of several books including English Visitors to Ireland from Raleigh to Newman, Newman, Education, and Ireland, Studies in Irish Biography and Introduction to the Dream of Gerontius.
He retained his seat, as an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TD, at the 1922 general election. Along with others, he maintained that the Irish Republic continued to exist and that the rump Second Dáil, composed of anti-Treaty TDs who refused to take their seats in the Free State parliament, was the only legitimate governmental authority in Ireland. He was defeated in the 1923 general election and subsequent November 1923 by-election.
In 1938, he was one of seven remaining abstentionist Second Dáil TDs who transferred the "authority" of what they believed was the Government of the Irish Republic to the IRA Army Council.
Family
William Stockley married Violet Osborne in 1892, daughter of Dublin artist William Osborne and sister of Walter Osborne. At her death in 1893 she left one daughter, Violet Annie Alice Stockley, who was brought up for some years by the Osborne family in Dublin. She later became a member of staff at Cheltenham Ladies' College and died unmarried in 1971.
In 1908 Stockley married Marie Germaine Kolb, the daughter of Max Kolb, director of the Botanical Gardens in Munich, and Sophie Danvin, a French pianist.[6] Marie Germaine Stockley died in Dublin in 1949 leaving one daughter, Sophia Stockley,[7][8] who in 1933 married James Laurence Mallin, eldest son of the executed Michael Mallin.[9]
His brother was the Anglican clergyman Joseph John Gabbett Stockley (1862-1949), Canon of Lichfield Cathedral. Stockley's sister-in-law was the German writer Annette Kolb, and a nephew, Alfred Kolb, was a West German diplomat who helped establish the Federal Republic's first Irish legation in 1951.
^In various obituaries of WFP Stockley in 1943, his father John Surtees Stockley (who had died 80 years previously) is referred to as "RHA" (possibly Royal Hibernian Academy, but that organisation has no record of his membership; more probably this stands for Royal Horse Artillery.) JS Stockley's gravestone (and contemporary newspaper reports) refer to him as "RA" or "late RA", referring to his time in the Royal Artillery.