The Many Lives of Albert Nobbs

Based on the story, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, written by Irish novelist, playwright George Moore, it tells of the life of a woman in 19^th century Dublin passing as a male servant in order to survive, not just economically but socially. The story has often been retold on screen and stage owing to the enduring nature of the themes and life of ‘Albert’ in his many guises.

 Most recently the film has been given the ‘big-screen’ film treatment starring Glen Close in the starring role. It was thirty years ago, however, when Close first played this role in an off-Broadway production in a stage version written and directed by Simone Benmussa.

The play was performed at the Manhattan Theater Club, in New York in 1982. The review from the New York Times of that production, dated 18 Jun 1982, makes special mention of the performance of the role of Nobbs by none other than a young actress called Glen Close:

“Miss Close, so lovely in ''Barnum'' and as Elena in ''Uncle Vanya'' at the Yale Repertory Theater, is almost unrecognizable as Albert. It is not simply a matter of her boyish hairdo -darkened and cut short - but of her manner, movement and sensibility. She is a timid youth who is efficient at work but without grace, eager to please but afraid to be expressive. The play is a curio, but the performance is transforming.”

Moving forward to 1996, Druid Theatre Company brought the Benmussa directed production to Druid Lane Theatre in July of that year. Jane Brennan would star in the role of Albert alongside cast members Dawn Bradfield, Aoife Kavannagh, Clara Simpson and others. The play would receive great critical and audience reception, with the Irish Times calling it “a rare harmony, a complete unity of execution”. The Druid archive, here in the James Hardiman Library, hold many files relating to this production. The catalogue can be accessed in full here . The files relating specifically to this production are as follows:

T2/233 Scope and Content: The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs - From a story by George Moore and directed by Simone Benmussa. Produced at Druid Lane Theatre, Galway. Includes original printed playbill from the production, featuring an article on the play and the works of George Moore by Elizabeth McConnell, Trinity College Dublin, biographical details with images on the cast members and Simone Benmussa and other details. 4 copies. 88 pp Printed flyer from the production featuring play information and booking details. 4 copies. 8 pp Printed invitation to the opening night performance of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. 1p. Date:9 Jul 1996 Extent:97 pp

T2/234 Scope and Content: The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs - Black and white photographs taken during rehearsal and production of the Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, devised by Simone Benmussa. Images measure 203mm X 254mm, with a white border of 25mm. Cast members are in costume and on set. Those pictured include director Simone Benmussa , a group shot of cast members outside Druid Theatre, also Clara Simpson, Jayne snow, Jane Brennan, Aoife Kavannagh, Dawn Bradfield and others on stage. Contact sheets contain twelve images per sheet. (11 sheets) Photographer is named as Angus McMahon.   Date: Jul 1996 Extent:28 pp

T2/235 Scope and Content: The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs - Typescript press release from Druid Theatre Company regarding details and promotion of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. Also includes biographical details on Simone Benmussa and excerpts of press commentary on the production of this work by Druid. Also includes a photocopy of typescript chronology of the life of George Moore, author of the story on which this play is based.   Date: Jul 1996 Extent:14 pp

 

T2/236 Scope and Content: The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs - Photocopy of typescript story, Albert Nobbs, written by George Moore. 22 pp Photocopy of typed script of the Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, devised by Simone Benmussa. Note on cover states the story is translated from French by Barbara Wright. 22 pp Copy of typed script for The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, adopted for the stage and directed by Simone Benmussa from Albert Nobbs by George Moore, translated by Barbara Wright. 47 pp, Date: Undated Extent:91 pp

 T2/237 Scope and Content: The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs - Printed poster from the production, featuring cast and production crew information and booking details.   Date: Jul 1996 Extent: 1 item

From Belsen to Galway - the Music of Yehudi Menuhin

One of the worlds most celebrated and respected violinists, Yehudi Menuhin, delighted Galway audiences in 1988 as he performed there for the first time. As part of the 1988/89 season, Music For Galway organised the concert in November where Menuhin conducted the Irish Chamber Orchestra and also featured cellist Daire Fitzgerald. The concert was held at Leisureland, Salthill.



Programme cover from the 1988 Galway Concert

Menuhin (22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999) was a Russian-American Jewish violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He is often considered to be one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. The press release issued by Music For Galway in 1988 publicising this concert outlines the many reasons why Menuhin is so highly revered. “Yehudi Menuhin is of course most famous as a violinist but the list of his other achievements is also staggering. He is particularly dedicated to young people and to the cause of world peace …Menuhin’s role as a conductor has been increasingly important in recent years. He is President and Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Warsaw Sinfonia and European Community Youth Orchestra.”

Menuhin was a boy prodigy, giving his first public concert début aged seven, he played Bériot’s Scène de Ballet accompanied at the piano by Louis Persinger. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 coincided with the birth of daughter Zamira and his first tour of South America later that same year. During World War II, Yehudi Menuhin gave more than 500 concerts for the Allied Armed Forces, in recognition of which he was awarded the French Legion of Honour, the Croix de Lorraine; the Belgian Ordre de la Couronne and Ordre Leopold; The Order of Merit from West Germany and the Order of the Phoenix from Greece. Menuhin went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for the inmates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after its liberation in April 1945. He went back to Germany in 1947 to perform music under the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler as an act of reconciliation, becoming the first Jewish musician to go back to Germany after the Holocaust.

Press cuttings from local press in Galway, 1988

In 1950 Menuhin challenged apartheid in South Africa and also undertook his first visit to Israel, despite threats against him. In 1989 he conducts Messiah in the Kremlin shortly after the collapse of the Communist regime. He has constantly been at the forefront of music and at the place and role of music in society and in its healing power on reconciliation.

In 1963, wishing to ensure continuance of the art of violin playing, Menuhin founded the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music at Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey, England, where it is still operating today. Yehudi Menuhin died in 1999.

The files in the Music For Galway Archive here in the James Hardiman Library relating to the concert by the Irish Chamber Orchestra and conducted by Sir Yehudi Menuhin are listed below:

P/91 5/7/149	The Irish Chamber Orchestra 20 Nov 1988 Printed programme from the concert conducted by Sir Yehudi Menuhin and featuring Daire Fitzgerald, held at Leisureland, Salthill, Galway.  Includes details of pieces performed, notes on each piece   and information on individual musicians. (3 copies, 8 pp)  Financial information including fees, expenditure and expected income; draft TS press releases and a biographical essay on Sir Yehudi Menuhin.         31 pp
5/7/150	The Irish Chamber Orchestra (Yehudi Menuhin) Nov 1988 Colour photographs, 151mm X 101mm, from a public occasion, attended by the Mayor of Galway, in honour of Yehudi Menuhin. Also pictured playing the fiddle is musician Frankie Gavin. Yehudi is also pictured signing an official register/visitor’s  book, with the Galway city crest on it.        28 items
5/7/151	The Irish Chamber Orchestra (Yehudi Menuhin) 1988 Assorted press cuttings taken from the Sunday Press and other unnamed publications reporting from the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Yehudi Menuhin concert  in Galway. Includes black and white images of Menuhin.    7 items The Menuhin Archive is housed at the Royal Academy of Music, London. The catalogue can be searched here: http://apollo.ram.ac.uk/emuweb/pages/ram/results.php The Music For Galway Archive is currently being catalogued here at the James Hardiman Library. For any enquiries email barry.houlihan@nuigalway.ie

Ritchie-Pickow Archive - A view into the past

The Ritchie-Pickow photographic archive is one of the most visually striking collections held in the Archives of the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The collection features a large volume of photographic negatives along with tapes of sound recordings. The photographs were taken and the recordings made by the husband and wife team George Pickow and Jean Ritchie on visits to Ireland in 1952 and 1953.

George Pickow was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Following art training at the Cooper Union, he worked in all areas of photographic media, from making training films for the US navy during the second World War to illustrating children’s books for Scribner’s and the Oxford University Press. Jean Ritchie, singer, folklorist and dulcimer player was born in 1922 in 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 thereafter. George Pickow and Jean Ritchie married in 1950 and shortly afterwards, in 1952, Ritchie was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enable her to research the origins of her family’s songs in Great Britain and Ireland.

The couple spent approximately eighteen months recording folk songs and traditional musicians and taking photographs around Ireland. The photographs include images 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 assisted Ritchie in the production and illustration of her many books on the traditional music of the Southern Appalachians, including the prize-winning Celebration of Life, and The Swapping Song Book (1952), a volume of songs from her native Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky.  Pickow also used the opportunity to do features on aspects of Irish cultural life including 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.

Image from Ritchie-Pickow Archive

 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.

The James Hardiman Library was pleased to be approached by the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, Massachusetts, to include some images from the Ritchie- Pickow Collection for their new exhibition: Rural Ireland – The Inside Story. The exhibition offers “new and unique evidence about the varied lives of a marginalised population in a changing Irish Society” and focuses on tenants, farmers, Famine-era Ireland, rural Ireland, music, dance, marriage customs and continuity and change in Irish rural life.

In the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole has written about how he visited the exhibition at the McMullen Museum and gave his thoughts here. O’Toole writes:

“The domestic sphere can’t be taken for granted: it may be abandoned in mass emigration, an awareness that haunts even an apparently simple image such as James Brenan’s News from America (1875). Or it may be invaded and torn asunder as in Harry Jones Thaddeus’s An Irish Eviction (1889), in which the action is seen from what should be the private, domestic space inside the cottage. Domesticity in the Irish context isn’t banal or cosy. It is a struggle for dignity and survival.”

Image from Ritchie-Pickow Archive

“In however highly qualified a way, the images can be seen as collaborations. As Angela Bourke points out in a typically incisive essay in the catalogue: “In order to sketch or paint an Irish rural interior – a private space – the artist had first to gain the permission and cooperation of the residents. Prosperous families may have felt honoured by such attention, but poorer people can only have been persuaded to admit the stranger and to pose for him or her by the possibility of financial reward. The finished image of an impoverished rural interior is a record of an economic opportunity, therefore, and probably of an economic transaction, formal or informal, in which both sides had parts to play.”

The Ritchie-Pickow archive offers insights into many of these societal and cultural aspects of rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century.  The images cover a number of locations, Dunmanway in County Cork, Dublin, the Aran Islands and Northern Ireland. They cover a wide variety of activities, ranging from cultural, sporting as well as traditional farming and fishing technique, to the more modern activities associated with an Garda Siochana and Aer Lingus in the Dublin of the early 1950s.

A striking feature of the archive is its depiction of life on the Aran Islands in the 1950s. Image show scenes of the rugged and challenging landscape, exterior and interior of cottages, scenes of domestic and family life, skills such as weaving, sailing and farming and cultural scenes such as cooking, dancing, praying as well as striking portraits of people and many other scenes of life for the inhabitants of the Aran Islands.

In contrast, these images are contrasted excellently by the hundreds of photographs of scenes from Dublin City of 1950’s Ireland. The images of Dublin highlight the many wonderful streetscapes and landmarks such as O’Connell Bridge and Statue, O’Connell Street, the Ha’penny Bridge, street traders and sellers, Trinity College, Grafton Street, various shop and business fronts, the American Embassy, the headquarters of an Garda Siochana and Dublin Airport.

The archive is a truly unique resource and allows for an unprecedented view through a lens to a different and much changed Ireland. For further information on the Ritchie-Pickow archive and for access to digital copies of the photos, see http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/collections/archives/depositedcollections/featuredcollections/ritchie-pickowcollection/

Frank Carty Papers, letter from Liam Lynch

On this day in 1923 Liam Lynch, O/C IRA was shot and fatally wounded effectively bringing to an end hostilities in the Irish Civil War. Today's document is from the Frank Carty Papers (POL7) and is a letter from Liam Lynch to O/C 3rd Western Division reviewing activity in Frank Carty's Brigade in Sligo.

Frank Carty was active in the War of Independence 1919-21. He became Officer Commanding Number 4 Brigade, 3rd Western Division, which operated in the Sligo area. During this time he escaped from Sligo Jail in May 1920, was recaptured, escaped from Derry, was training IRA men in Glasgow and was involved in a shootout on the streets there. On the outbreak of the Civil War he sided with the anti-treaty side and was active in a number of operations from his base in the Ox Mountains. He was elected to the second Dail in June 1921 and served through nine general elections, first with Sinn Fein and later with Fianna Fail.

This letter, damaged in parts, is from [Liam Lynch] Chief of Staff, Oglach na hEireann to O/C/ 3rd Western Division, dated 28th November 1922, thanking him for his report on the activities of the Number 4 brigade. It notes for the 13th July: "The attack and capture of the enemy party and armoured car "Ballinalee" on this date was a splendid victory and the bravery of the forces engaged deserve special praise". Ends with general comments on the need to develop road-mining and the manufacture of weapons and munitions.

'Through a Swedish Lens' exhibition now on at James Hardiman Library

A new exhibition, Through a Swedish Lens, is currently on for the month of March at the James Hardiman Library.  This photographic exhibition, on loan from the National Folklore Collection held at University College Dublin, celebrates the contribution of four Swedish scholars and writers to Irish culture in the first half of the twentieth century. They include the celebrated folklorist Carl Wilhelm von sydow, the ethnologists Albert Eskeröd and Åke Campbell, and the writer Harriet Hjorth Wetterström. Each of them went on to play a significant role in advancing the study of Irish folklore and ethnology and in cultivating Swedish-Irish relations. The photographs featured in this exhibition present an incredible insight into Irish life, culture, dress, housing and landscape during the 1930s and 1940s.

The beginnings of this association can be traced to a chance meeting in a Dublin bookshop in 1921 between Sèamus Ò’Duilearag, at the time a Celtic Studies undergraduate at U.C.D., and Reidar Thorolf Christiansen, a Norwegian Folklore scholar. They maintained a correspondence over the following years, and Christiansen became  a strong supporter of Irish Folklore studies and a contributor to Bèaloideas, the journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, which was founded in 1926, and of which Ò’Duilearga was editor.

Following a lecture delivered by Christiansen in Dublin in 1927, the Norwegian introduced Ò’Duilearga to the influential Swedish Folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, who was also in attendance. A fluent Irish speaker von Sydow was convinced of the potential for Folklore collecting and study in Ireland and its relevance to European Folklore scholarship. His interventions at critical moments led to the setting up of the Irish Folklore Institute in 1930 and most importantly, its successor, the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935, with Seamus Ò’Duilearga appointed director of both institutions.

The connections established  by Ò’Duilearga upon further research visits to Folklore and cultural institutions in Sweden, such as at Skansen, led to meetings with Folklorist Åke Campbell, whose photographs also feature in this exhibition. Carol von Sydow was a Sedish scholar who taught at University of Lund for many years. Already fluent in several languages by 1917, he started to learn Irish under the Norwegian Celtic Scholar Carl Marstrander. On a visit to Ireland in order to immerse himself in the Irish language, Von Sydow stayed on the Blasket Islands, West Kerry and also West Cork before travelling to Galway and the Aran Islands, collecting Folklore on his way. Eager to further document his travels around Ireland, the 300 photos he took comprise a unique and intimate portrayal of Irish life.

Åke Campbell undertook a month long expedition to Ireland in 1934 in order to document folklore and ethnological practices of the people and places he encountered in Galway, Kerry, Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, with a focus on building types, farming, fishing and other aspects of material folk culture. The photographic collection created by Campbell along his travels is again a unique pictorial record of Irish life.  

Albert Eskeröd was a colleague of Campbell and a former student of von Sydow. He was part of the team that undertook a survey of Ireland  in 1935 focusing on an investigation of the eastern, southern and western districts of Ireland focusing on inland farming and coastal fishing practices specifically. Writing of his experiences in Ireland, Eskeröd stated it “was a beautiful country, this young Irish Free State, which nevertheless possesses traditions and a history older than any country in Northern Europe.”

Harriet Hjorth Wetterström was a travel writer and novelist and made her first visit to Ireland in 1946. She wrote a pioneering study, Irlandskust, in Swedish, of the coastal fishing practices and communities of the west of Ireland, travelling from Cork as far north as Donegal. Equipped with a camera provided by Eskeröd, Wetterström diligently compliled an exceptional pictorial record of her journey through Ireland.

The photographic collections of these for scholars complement each other into an exceptional exhibition complied by the Irish Folklore Archive in U.C.D. The exhibition also ties in with some of the many collections of the Archives and Special Collections service of the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, such as the Delargy Book Collection, the library of James Delargy (Seamus Ò’Duilearga), Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, 1935-71. This collection contains over 4000 volumes on folklore, folklife and celtic studies.

This exhibition also connects with photographic material in other collections such as the Balfour Album. The Balfour Album of photographs was originally created in 1893-1895 by the Belfast photographer, Robert John Welch. It was a gift to the former Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur J. Balfour in recognition of his support for the building of the Galway-Clifden Railway. The album was presented to Arthur Balfour in the summer of 1896, a year after the railway had opened. The collection has been digitised and is available via the James Hardiman Library here

Through a Swedish Lens is on exhibition at the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway throughout the month of March.

A New Home for Archives at NUI Galway

It is an increasingly exciting time here at NUI Galway as next door to the James Hardiman Library, constructions work is continuing at speed on the Arts, Humanities and Social Science Research Building.

The AHSSRB will house a hub for research at NUI Galway across a wide range of disciplines across the Arts, Humanities, Social Science and more. Key to this research building will be the new home for Archives and Special Collections of the James Hardiman Library. The move to this new purpose-built building will allow for a large-scale expansion of service by the Archives and Special Collections section as well as the other research bodies that the AHSRRB will house.

The new building will include bespoke designed environmentally controlled archival storage, a reading room of over 40 reader spaces, acclimatisation rooms for archives, processing room, digitisation centre,  lecture rooms, meeting rooms and a dedicated exhibition space to name just a few of the confirmed features.

The Archives and Special Collections service of the James Hardiman Library are delighted to be working in bringing you this exciting development to our service and look forward to welcoming you to our new home for research in Spring 2013. Here are some images that show the huge development happening here on campus at NUI Galway:

Shields Archive - Letter from Sean O'Casey to Barry Fitzgerald, 1959

This day marks the birth of William Joseph Shields in 1888. A civil servant, his first interest was acting and he followed his brother Arthur into the Abbey, taking the stage name Barry Fitzgerald to avoid any problems with his employer. His best roles in the Abbey were in Sean O’Casey plays, and from the late 1920s he found himself in film roles. Deciding to become a professional actor, he toured with the Abbey in the States in the 1930s, going into the film business. His defining moment in film came in 1944 when he starred as Fr Fitzgibbon alongside Bing Crosby in Going my way (1944). Nowadays he is perhaps best remembered as the match-maker MicaleenOg in The Quiet Man by John Ford, shot here in Galway by John Ford in 1952, a film in which his brother Arthur also starred. He died in Dublin on 4^th January 1961.

Today’s image, a letter dated 11 Dec 1959, is from Sean O'Casey, Flat 3, 40 Trumlands Road, St. Marychurch, Torquay, Devon addressed to Will (Barry Fitzgerald). O'Casey writes that he has heard that Fitzgerald was ill, he writes 'I hope you are up, or, if not up then sitting bolt upright in bed having another look at the world.'

For more check out the Shields Family Collection, housed in the James Hardiman Library, a descriptive list for the collection is available at http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/FramedList.cgi?T13 .