Auto Archives - Motoring Through History - #ExploreArchives

Today's theme looks at cars and the history of motoring in various collections. Being able to look back and admire the design and engineering of early cars in the twentieth century also prompts us to look at how the needs of motorists have also changed over the years. Records from the Galway Town Commissioner's ledgers of minutes and correspondence (Collection LA4) show how in 1918, as the War was still ongoing in Europe, a concern for the local Town Commission was the level of damage being caused to local roads owing to the increased volume of army vehicle traffic. Read the entry from the volume in full below:

 Some other items and images of interest are from the photographic archive of Jean Ritchie and George Pickow. Ritchie was a celebrated American folk singer, who was part of the famous 'Singing Ritchies' family of Appalachia area of America. On Fullbright scholarship trip to Ireland in the early 1950s, Jean travelled around Ireland collecting folk songs from various individuals. Accompanied by her husband George Pickow, their trip records not only the image below of Jean with, perhaps, a Daimler car in 1953. (A positive I.D. on the make and model of the car is welcome!)

Also of interest within this collection are wonderful images of Dublin's O'Connell street in the early 1950s. We are used to seeing Dublin's streets choked with traffic today but we can but imagine the quite recent past of the 1950s where bicycles far outnumbered the number of cars on Dublin's main thoroughfare. These images show another side of Irish society, before the motor car became the primary mode of transport in today's society. It is also of the period between when Dublin's original tram system was removed and today's modern LUAS was reinstalled onto Dublin's streets.

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The View from Nelson's Pillar - From the Archives

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of Nelson's Pillar on Dublin's O'Connell Street in 1966. Despite the historic and often controversial opinion in which the statue was held, the end and fate of Nelson and his pillar could, perhaps, not have been predicted or foreseen. On this anniversary, it is timely to look back into the archives of this period and see just how this statue dominated the streetscape and skyline of Dublin's O'Connell Street. By virtue of its location the pillar was a witness   to some of the most significant events in Irish history, as well as to the development of the main thoroughfare of Ireland's capital city.

These images are from the Ritchie-Pickow archive within the Hardiman Library of NUI Galway. Taken by American photographer George Pickow when he and his wife, the famous American folk-singer, Jean Ritchie, came to Ireland in 1952-53. Jean received a full-bright scholarship to come to Ireland and immerse herself in the folk song tradition and culture of Ireland and collected songs from many leading Irish singers and musicians, especially in the west of Ireland. The couple also travelled through Dublin and took many incredible images of a Dublin that is long removed from our own recognition. George was able to take photographs from atop of Nelson's Pillar and this offers a viewpoint through Pickow's own lens but also of a vantage point of Dublin city that disappeared as quickly as the pillar itself.

Other images are also available images from the Ritchie-Pickow archive at the Hardiman Library, NUI Galway.

Arthur Shields - The Rising on the Street, Stage and Screen

On the 11th February 1926, rioting greeted the Abbey Theatre performance of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" because of what was viewed as it's anti-Irish sentiment. Yeats tells the audience "You have disgraced yourselves again".

From the Arthur Shields Family Collection is a photograph from that production, featuring G Fallon, Arthur Shields, FJ McCormack and Shelah Richards(T13/B/246). In spite of the controversy surrounding aspects of the play, it played to full houses, and had many re-runs and revivals, as well as a film version in 1937.

In a reply to critics, printed in "The Irish Times" on 19 February 1926, O'Casey tackled some of the criticisms of the play, and went on to state.

The politicians - Free State and Republican - have the platform to express themselves, and Heavens knows they seem to take full advantage of it. The drama is my place for self-expression, and I claim the liberty in drama that they enjoy on the platform (and how they do enjoy it!), and am prepared to fight for it.

In a unique twist, Arthur Shields, an actor and stage manager at the Abbey Theatre, was also an active participant in the Easter Rising of 1916, would star in the 1926 production of "The Plough and the Stars" at the Abbey Theatre and also feature in the 1936 film version of "Plough and the Stars", directed by John Ford.

For more on productions of "The Plough and the Stars" check out the Shields Family Collection athttp://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/FramedList.cgi?T13 and programmes from the various Abbey Theatre productions of 'The Plough and the Stars' as part of the abbey Theatre Digital Archive, available at the Hardiman Library. 

Public Lecture: "The "Singing Flame" Rekindled: The Destruction of the Public Records Office 30 June 1922"

"The "Singing Flame" Rekindled: The Destruction of the Public Records Office 30 June 1922"

In the opening engagement of the Irish civil war on the 30th June 1922, the irreplaceable archive held in the Public Records Office inside Dublin's Four Courts was destroyed by fire and explosion. 

Immediately the opposing Free State forces and anti-treaty IRA blamed each other for the Public Records Office's destruction. In recent years some leading historians have claimed that the anti-treaty IRA deliberately destroyed the archive as act of vandalism before surrendering to the Free State Army. The evidence for this interpretation, as Dr John M. Regan explains in his lecture, is far from conclusive.

Regan revisits an iconic event of modern Irish history to open a discussion about the different ways history is written. Interpretations of the destruction of the Public Records Office, Regan argues, demonstrate how some historians reinterpreted the past in response to the recent 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland.

The reinterpretation Regan describes rewrites the past not as it happened, or the way we were taught it happened, but instead recasts history in a more desirable form better suited to our needs in the present. This approach to the past has sometimes been inaccurately called 'Revisionist History', but like other professional historians Regan's call the approached 'Invented History', where its aim is to amend, redefine, and 'improve' the publics' memory. Invented history, Regan says, has been a preoccupation of some Irish historians over recent decades, but he questions whether or not society is best served by it.

Dr John M. Regan is lecturer in Irish, British, and Public History at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His latest book Myth and the Irish State was published by Irish Academic Press in December.

O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, 1950s - Ritchie/Pickow Archive

This wonderful image of a crowded O'Connell Bridge in Dublin is part of the Ritchie-Pickow photographic archive at the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The image dates to the early 1950's and is a clear scene of a bright morning on Dublin's busy main thoroughfare.

Jean Ritchie, singer, folklorist and dulcimer player was born on 8 December 1922 in Viper, Kentucky. She was the youngest of a family of 14 children, known as .The Singing Ritchies. Jean graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1946 and taught for a time. In 1952 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enable her to research the origins of her family's songs in Great Britain and Ireland. Her husband George Pickow, a photographer, accompanied her and they spent approximately eighteen months recording folk songs and traditional musicians and taking photographs. The photographs include photographs of many well-known uileann pipe players, for example Seamus Ennis, Michael Reagh, the McPeake trio, Leo Rowsome; vocalists, including Elizabeth Croinin, Sarah Makem and Mary Toner and story tellers, such as Patcheen Faherty from the Aran Islands.

As well as assisting his wife in her research George Pickow also used the opportunity to do features on aspects of Irish life, Christmas celebrations with straw boys and wren boys, life on the Aran Islands, Dublin scenes, the American Ambassador and his family in Ireland, the story of St Patrick, the development of Dublin Airport, operations of the Garda Síochána at Dublin Castle, and Irish sporting activities, such as road bowling, hurling, coursing, hunting and racing. Photographs were also taken of traditional Irish crafts, for example spinning, weaving, thatching and crios and sliotar making. In a video recording made with George and Jean Pickow in the early 1990s regarding their visits to Ireland, George says that these photographic stories were for the Sunday News  in New York.

The photographic archive is comprised of one hundred and sixty seven sheets of black and white contact prints with corresponding negatives, numbering one thousand eight hundred and eighty seven photographs in total. The majority of the photographs were taken using Kodak safety film and these negatives are unfortunately not numbered so the sequence cannot be followed. The last ten sheets of photographs were taken using Eastman 5 6 super xx safety film and Ilford hypersensitive panchromatic film, these negatives are numbered. There are also one hundred and ninety prints in two sizes, 19x19 cms and 27x27 cms, of which ninety five are mounted.

To see more images from the Ritchie-Pickow Archive click here

Visit the home page of James Hardiman Library Archives at NUI Galway here

 

The Nativity - Christmas Scenes, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde

Cover of The Nativity script by Lady Gregory

For a festive themed update from the archives of the James Hardiman Library, we delved into our collections and discovered this wonderful overlap between two of the most prolific of literary and political figures from the West, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde. The pair penned a version and  presentation of The Nativity which took to the national stage, the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin and to the stage of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast many years apart, but not without incident in between.

The play would begin its life by being written in Irish by Douglas Hyde in 1902 and translated into English shortly thereafter by Lady Gregory. However, it would be 1911 before the play would reach the Abbey Theatre stage in Dublin.

It is noted in Douglas Hyde – Maker of Modern Ireland (Janet Egleson Dunleavy and Gareth W Dunleavy, University of California, 1991) how on one of Hyde's many visits to Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory in Galway, how Hyde's playwrighting was inspired by his muse – Gregory – and flourished while writing in quiet solitude in Coole Park. "In late August of 1902, [Hyde's] diary entry in Irish for (August 25) reads, "They shoved me into my room and I wrote a small play in three or four hours on Angus the Culdee. Entitled An Naomh ar Iarraid (The lost saint), it was published in the 1902 issue of Samhain and performed in early 1903. A first attempt to adapt for popular theater themes and characters from the Irish manuscript tradition, it drew upon Hyde's reading and research in ninth-century monastic Christianity, especially the legends that had been woven around the figure of Aongus Céile Dé (Oengus the Culdee).

Encouraged by the ease with which An Naomh had almost written itself, Hyde decided that his next subject would be the Nativity; his source, a medieval miracle play.

Dráma Breithe Chríosta, Hyde's nativity play, was finished within the month that followed and published in the Christmas, 1902, double number edition of the Weekly Freeman, accompanied by a translation in English by Lady Gregory. There was trouble about it almost from the start. A 1904 performance scheduled for Christmas had to be cancelled when it became the subject of a resolution passed by priests in Kilkenny, criticizing some questionable passages that they perceived as causing possible confusion between superstition and dogma. Continually refused for six years thereafter, Dráma Breithe Chríosta finally had its premiere at the Abbey Theatre in January 1911, with Sara Allgood as the First Woman, Máire O'Neill as the Second Woman, and Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh as Mary. The Abbey sets were designed by Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son.

The production charmed both audiences and reviewers. Other productions followed. For almost a quarter of a century—until the offending passages were blacked out in a school edition of the play printed in 1935—no one took notice of the problem that had troubled the Kilkenny priests."

The Nativity play as written by Hyde and translated into English by Gregory did find its production on the Abbey stage in 1911 and again in December 1932. These records and indeed all of the Abbey Theatre productions are currently being digitised here in NUI Galway as part of our recent digital archive partnership with the Abbey Theatre. The Lady Gregory Library also resides as part of Special Collections here at the James Hardiman Library.

Scene from the Lyric Theatre production of The Nativity

First page of the Gregory script of The Nativity, Lyric Theatre Archive (T4)

What people may not know about is that this Nativity was in fact also produced by the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in December 1950. The archive of the Lyric Theatre here at the James Hardiman Library notes material which includes that relating to the production of Nativity by Lady Augusta Gregory, organised and directed by Mary O'Malley prior to the formation of the Lyric Players Theatre. The files include a copy of the script with some handwritten annotations, and with a rough drawing of the set design, and two card-mounted photographs, one showing two female characters on stage, the other an image of the actors playing Joseph and Mary at the crib, two copies of a photograph of six male cast members and the introductions to each piece of entertainment, written by John Irvine.

As you can see in, these wonderful images of the Lyric production highlight what is not just perhaps a lost or unknown production of this Hyde/Gregory play but also how this piece, a direct product of the Irish Literary Revival saw professional productions North and South of the border over forty years apart.

For a full listing of the Lyric Theatre Archive click here

 

 

Remembering the Eucharistic Congress of 1932

Catholic Eucharistic Congresses are gatherings of ecclesiastics and laymen for the purpose of celebrating the Holy Eucharist. The 31st International Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin, 21-26 June, 1932. It was the premier international Catholic event. The 1932 Congress was hugely significant in terms of asserting the identity of the Irish Free State as a leading Catholic nation. It was the largest public spectacle in twentieth-century Ireland. There was even an act passed by the Government specifically for the event. It was called the Eucharistic Congress (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1932. It was timed to mark the 1500^th anniversary of St. Patrick.

Each celebrant was issued with a handbook. (See cover below)

This handbook contained a programme of events throughout the city of Dublin.

Also among our holdings of Archives and Special Collections here at the James Hardiman Library are photographs taken by an unidentified photographer at the Congress, including scenes from religious events, parades and informal photographs of clerics from around the world in Dublin: