Cole was born in Liverpool on 15 May 1866 to an Irish father, George Cole, a railway accountant, and an English mother, Arabella Hughes.[3] He was educated at the St Francis Xavier's College, Liverpool and the University of London. He married Anna Harrison in 1894, who had been born in the USA. The couple moved to Dublin and had three sons. Harrison died in 1921, and Cole married Mary Redden in 1928, with whom he had two daughters.[3]
Politics
As a well-off supporter of the underground Irish republican movement in the early twentieth century, his house on Mountjoy Square seems to have been a regular meeting place for senior figures within that movement. The notes of Seamus Reader, an Irish Volunteer from Glasgow, record a meeting on 2 January 1916 at Cole's house:
Shortly after 5pm on the 2nd, January 1916, I went to Cole's house, Mountjoy Square, Dublin, where, while waiting in the kitchen for tea, I jotted my coded notes for my report to Scotland. I then went to the room where I met Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, J Connolly, P Pearse and McDonagh.[4]
Cole is also documented as having hosted provisional Dáil meetings at his home,[5][6] the assembly having been driven underground in September 1919. He was arrested by the military at his home at No. 3 Mountjoy Square in 1920.[1]