ELVA JOHNSTON, PETER CROOKS and TIMOTHY MURTAGH (eds)
Irish Manuscripts Commission
€30
ISBN 9781906865948
Reviewed by
Catriona Crowe
The Public Record Office, built in 1867 as Ireland’s official archival repository for the records of the state, was a major casualty of the Battle of the Four Courts in June 1922 at the start of the Civil War.
When I started work in the Public Record Office (PRO) in the mid-1970s, it was a place that had suffered official neglect for years. My arrival, with four other young archivists, was the first proper increase in staff granted to the PRO since 1922, and the staff complement was still well below that which obtained before 1922. The place itself had all kinds of idiosyncrasies, from an open fire in the Reading Room (absolute anathema now) to five savage kittens and their mother living among the papers of the wartime Special Criminal Court in the basement.
It gradually became clear to us new archivists that a miasma hung over the place and that its source was the destruction of 1922. It was rarely talked about; over the decades a belief had grown that mentioning it could only cause damage to the PRO’s reputation, reinforcing the idea that we had nothing worth talking about and therefore should not be resourced. This was not at all true, but it was internalised to a large degree by the staff. One of my colleagues assuaged his archival anxieties by coming up with a baroque formula letter to go out to correspondents: ‘Dear Sir or Madam, I deeply regret to have to inform you that the item you seek tragically perished in the terrible conflagration of 1922’.
So, what was in the PRO before the ‘terrible conflagration’? We know exactly what was there because of Herbert Wood’s Guide to the records deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland (1919). The records ranged in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, and you will find details of them in the volume under review. Suffice it to say that their loss was an archival calamity from which it took many years to recover.
My own most-lamented cohort of destroyed records are the pre-Famine census records, which would be so valuable to scholars and family historians today. It’s heartbreaking to think that we could have the names of the eight million+ people who lived here in 1841 had any of the many appeals to the garrison in the Four Courts in 1922 been heeded. Alas, they were not.
The work of painstaking reconstruction went on for years after the destruction of 1922. By 1928 a new repository had been constructed on the site of the old PRO, and a very depleted staff had moved back in to continue the work of seeking substitutes for the lost records. Many records had escaped destruction—some, like those of the Chief Secretary’s Office, because they had not been transferred to the PRO in time to be burned owing to bureaucratic inertia. These, dating from 1796 to 1922, form the most important archive relating to nineteenth-century Ireland anywhere in the world.
A large collection of seventeenth-century Chancery Pleadings and other records, like the Statute Roll of Henry VIII and early Exchequer material, survived the fire itself through chance and good fortune. The 1901 and 1911 census records survived in the Registrar General’s Office. The records of the Quit Rent Office (dealing with land revenues due to the Crown), the Valuation Office, the Office of Public Works and the Commissioners of National Education (dealing with the administration of the primary education system from 1831 on) all survived, and in due course were transferred to the newly rebuilt PRO.
The battle to create and implement new and appropriate legislation also continued apace, culminating in the National Archives Act of 1986, which guaranteed the preservation of government records and their accessibility to the public 30 years after their creation. The National Archives is now a modern, innovative organisation, albeit understaffed and critically short of space. Landmark legislation defines its responsibilities and rights and has led to huge transfers of records over the last 30 years, with a consequent flowering of twentieth-century Irish historiography. We owe a great debt to our predecessors who undertook to rebuild a national cultural institution from the ashes and fought to restore popular understanding of the importance of evidential history and the processes required to ensure its survival.
The Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC) was established in 1928 as a direct response to the destruction of the PRO. Since 1930 the IMC has overseen the publication of some 170 editions, mainly of original manuscripts but also of facsimiles and calendars. Its serial publication Analecta Hibernica, first published in 1930, is devoted to the publication of shorter manuscripts, lists and reports.
The volume under review is a special edition devoted to the fire of 1922. After the Commission’s annual report, in which it details its partnership with the Virtual Repository of Ireland, it begins with an account of the fire in 1922 and its consequences, in which the authors, Peter Crooks, Elva Johnston and Timothy Murtagh, describe the contents of the PROI before the fire as ‘a story of Ireland from 1172 to 1922, an archival palimpsest of invasions and confiscations, of immigration and emigration, of opportunity and denial’.
This is followed by an essay by Peter Crooks and Zöe Reid on the salved documents that were collected by PRO staff in the aftermath. The various methods of conservation, past and present, applied to these often extremely challenging documents are outlined. There are 378 parcels of them, and not all will be currently salvageable or, in some cases, worth saving. The criteria to be applied are ‘archival coherence and historical significance’. The IMC has supported this important project, which is ongoing. This essay precedes a very useful catalogue of salved documents, giving information about their quantities, date spans, condition and relevant literature.
Elizabeth Biggs and Paul Dryburgh edit and introduce a document tantalisingly titled ‘The State of the Irish Exchequer, c. 1284’, setting out the widespread corruption prevailing among the officials responsible for the state’s finances more than a century after the Norman invasion. This document comes from the National Archives in the UK, illustrating the wealth of Irish-related material that can be brought to bear on the huge losses of 1922.
The indefatigable Peter Crooks, with Lynn Kilgallon, contextualises and edits documents bearing on the Talbot–Ormond struggle for control of Ireland in the early fifteenth century, focusing on the years 1441–2. Sarah Hendriks gives us early membership lists of the Dublin Guild of Carpenters, 1514–20, an important document for early labour history, held by Dublin City Library and Archives. Brid McGrath manages to make a list of names in 1616 into a fascinating account of the displacement of the Old English by their ambitious New English successors at the inauguration of Oliver St John as lord deputy. This document, from the Folger Library in the US, would have been an adjunct to a fuller account of the inauguration which was lost in the fire.
David Brown explores the Bank of Ireland archive to uncover a ledger from 1797–9, a register of investors in British government bonds just before the Act of Union and during the 1798 rebellion. Fourteen per cent of the investors were women, by Brown’s account a proportion to be found in ledgers preceding and succeeding this one, a potentially rich resource for researchers. Timothy Murtagh finds the letters of Edward Cooke, an under-secretary at the Chief Secretary’s Office during the 1798 rebellion and the Act of Union negotiations. They are in the archive of his correspondent Sir George Hill, which is held among the very rich collections of family papers in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Cooke is as interested in gossip and social climbing as in putting down the United Irishmen. After Hill delivers a successful public address in Derry in 1797 (and Cooke refers to that contested city as Derry throughout), he writes to him: ‘I consider you to have accepted the Big Wig’.
Brian Gurrin explores surviving returns from the ill-fated 1813–15 census. Ciaran Wallace looks at the PROI administrative records to lay out parts of its history from 1867 to 1922. The volume ends with a photographic essay, which vividly illustrates the damage done to records in the fire, and the increasingly innovative methods of conserving them.
The proximate reason for this fascinating volume is the existence of a remarkable archival project focused on recuperating, restoring, replicating and supplementing records damaged and lost in the fire of 1822. ‘Beyond 2022: the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland’ (VRTI) is a collaborative digital project involving archives in the Republic, Northern Ireland, the UK and the US to locate Irish or Irish-related material that will fill some of the huge gaps in our archives left by the destruction of 1922. The project aims to reconstruct over 250 million words lost to history in that destruction and to place the documents containing them in a virtual repository visually modelled on the old PRO record treasury. VRTI was conceived and developed by Peter Crooks and the late Seamus Lawless of Trinity College, Dublin.
VRTI, launched with the first tranches of documents on its website (virtualtreasury.ie) on 30 June 2022, the centenary of the fire and explosion in the PRO, is the most ambitious cultural digital project ever proposed in Ireland. The website has had 3.5 million engagements since its launch, 50% of which came from outside Ireland. A visit to the website reveals immense riches, from medieval financial records revealing the structure of the early Norman state to the crucial records of the huge seventeenth-century land transfers, the 1766 religious census and much more. It is very easy to go down a rabbit hole and emerge much later, such is the variety and interest of the contents. I recommend using the very helpful user-guide videos at the beginning of your acquaintance with the site.
The various archives partnering with the project include the National Archives of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Archives UK, reflecting the government structures and relationships in place since the Good Friday Agreement. There are 70+ other organisations also participating, including almost all Irish archives, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, the Morgan Library in New York and many others. The outreach of the project will continue to expand, bringing in many other organisations with Irish-related material to fill the digital repository.
This is a unique endeavour that could be the envy of many other countries, and a model and template for post-colonial societies to reassemble records lost in various ways. The VRTI can also become a comprehensive research hub of great value to scholars of Irish history all over the world, bringing our diaspora closer to its past. Let us cherish this opportunity to do something extraordinary beyond the Decade of Centenaries and secure the state’s support for this world-class project into the future.
Catriona Crowe is a former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland.