Matthew Jebb, Director of the National Botanic Gardens, and Ciarán Walsh, Curator.ie in the Library of the National Botanic Gardens in October 2023 (Photo: curator.ie)
When Haddon met Synge
The early records of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (DNFC) are held in the Library of the National Botanic Gardens. The archive contains correspondence and records relating to the establishment of the club in the winter of 1885 and its inaugural meeting on 11 January 1886, when Alfred Cort Haddon enrolled John Millington as an “original” member. Charles Shier, Hon. Secretary of the DNFC, gave me permission to consult the records in October 2023 and Matthew Jebb, Director of the National Botanic Gardens, guided me through the archive.
In this blog, I let the original documents tell the story of how Haddon met Synge. I set the scene with the typescript of the final draft of G. W. D. Bailey’s 1986 history Reflections and recollections : 100 years of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (available in the RDS Library and Archives). Haddon’s correspondence with other field clubs in 1885 is as fascinating as the record of changing membership over the next three years. The emphasis on inclusion makes this a radical enterprise and challenges the implication of Edward Stephens’s claim that his Uncle John had joined a club dominated by ‘distinguished scientists or elderly amateurs’.
On the left, Haddon (front, second from left) strikes a contrary pose in 1885 alongside natural scientists associated with the Royal Irish Academy (permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA). On the right, Synge (right, front row) poses with his family for a photograph taken around the same time.
Synge kept his membership card and other material relating to the club’s activities and, although primarily interested in birds, he made a note in his Nature Diary of a lecture on Atlantis that Haddon gave. Synge was fourteen years old and the letters Haddon wrote to his children during fieldwork give a very clear idea of how he would have treated a teenager who showed up at the first meeting of the DNFC. The impact on Synge can be traced in references to Haddon’s work in The Playboy of the Western World and The Aran Islands. Furthermore, both shared an interest in anarchism and photography. Synge’s use of photography as an armature for text in The Aran Islands – which John Masefield described in 1916 – closely follows the ethnographic methodology Haddon developed in the Aran Islands in 1890.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Charles Shier and members of Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club for permission to reproduce scanned facsimiles of the original records. Synge’s membership card and other DNFC material are held in Trinity College, University of Dublin and I acknowledge the help I received from Aisling Lockhart, Manuscripts Library, and Gill Whelan, Digital Collections.
The discussions referred to include extensive correspondence between Haddon and other field clubs, which generated the club rules presented at the first meeting.
The emphatic reference to inclusion in terms of gender and class acknowledges strong links between the field club and university extension movements in Ireland and the UK. Both sought to get around barriers to participation in third level education. Haddon was active in both movements and this activism provides the setting for his development of social and cultural ethnology as an anticolonial alternative to the racist, physical anthropology that dominated the fledgeling discipline of anthropology in TCD and Cambridge.
Used with the kind permission of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club
“December 20th Prof Haddon lectured in Naturalist club on the supposed Atlantis or submerged continent which he proved never existed”. (Synge, Nature Diary, 1883-1893. IE TCD MS 4370).
Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin University
Unpacking the archive of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club in the Library of the National Botanic Gardens, October 2023.
Ballymaclinton 