A Very English Savage | ‘the head-hunter’ and ‘the playboy’

Were Haddon the ‘head-hunter’ and Synge ‘the playboy‘ on the same side? Were they sympathetic to the de-Anglicisation project Douglas Hyde launched in 1892? If so, it would turn history on its head, but two portraits of Aran Islanders taken eight years point that way.

Andrew Francis Dixon took the photo on the left in 1890 in the company of Alfred Cort Haddon, a budding anthropologist who revelled in his nickname ‘the Head-hunter’. John Millington Synge took the photo on the right in 1898 at the start of a literary experiment that produced The Playboy of the Western World.

Left: A. F. Dixon. 1890. Detail of photograph printed from a digitised silver gelatine negative (Walsh & Rooney 2009, © curator.ie) The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. Right: John Millington Synge. 1898. Detail of photograph printed from a digitised silver gelatine negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton, Daniel Scully 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

Since the 1990s, most academics have placed Haddon and Synge on opposite sides one hundred years before, when British rule and Anglo-Saxon colonisation faced unprecedented challenges from Home Rule, the Gaelic revival movement, and literary modernism. Haddon, so the historiography goes, was a colonial scientist who measured the heads of islanders in search of the racial origins of natives who refused to behave like loyal subjects of the Crown. Synge, on the other hand, lived amongst the island dwellers and turned stories of western playboys into a riotous piece of modern theatre that signalled the beginning of the end of the colonial era in Irish literature and art.

Left. Haddon on board the S. S. Brandon in 1885 (detail), with permission Royal Irish Academy © RIA. Right. Synge in Paris in 1897 (curator.ie collection).

It’s a striking contrast that suits a methodology built around binaries, but Haddon and Synge’s photographs tell a different story. I focus here on one aspect of this: Synge’s insistence that a young boy posing for a photograph wear his ‘island homespuns’ instead of his ‘Galway suit’. Ten years earlier, Haddon insisted that the people he photographed in the Torres Strait wear ‘native petticoats’ rather than the ‘calico gowns’ introduced by missionaries.

Was this a coincidence?

Hardly. Haddon and Synge met in 1886, when the latter – then fourteen years of age and fascinated by ornithology –­ became an original member of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club which Haddon founded. I trace the impact of that encounter in A Very English Savage and all the evidence I found points to a shared commitment to anticolonial activism as the best explanation for their rejection of the ‘Galway suit’ and the ‘calico gown’. Douglas Hyde shared the same dislike of colonial dress and in 1892 described the revival of native dress as a necessary act of de-Anglicisation in pursuit of national autonomy. That places the ‘head-hunter’ and ‘the playboy’ on the same side and in sympathy with the anticolonial campaign Hyde launched in 1892.

Lack of space meant that I presented heavily edited version of the evidence in A Very English Savage and I consider it here in more detail.

The Galway Suit

On May 10 1898, Synge boarded the The Citie of the Tribes in Galway and headed to the Aran Islands. He spent two weeks on Inis Mór, the largest island, before moving to Inis Meáin, the middle island, where he stayed for four weeks. He was an experienced photographer but he forgot his camera and bought a Lancaster ‘Rover’ from another traveller staying in the Atlantic Hotel. He took two photographs of an islander that Lilo Stephens, custodian of Synge’s photographs, identified as Martin McDonagh:

Lilo Stephens.1971. My Wallet of Photographs: The photographs of J.M.Synge arranged and introduced by Lilo Stephens, Dolmen Editions.

John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photographs from scanned silver gelatine negatives (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

The same story features a number of times in Haddon’s account of his first ethnographic encounters in the Torres Strait and New Guinea in 1888.

The Calico Gown

Haddon boarded the S.S. Taroba outside London in July 1888 and landed on Thursday Island (Waiben) in the Torres Strait on 8 August. He immediately set about exploring the islands that lay between Australia and New Guinea. He recorded his encounters with the islanders in his journal, sketchbooks and photographs.

He landed on Nagheer (Nagir) on 13 August and recorded that ‘The women had on calico gowns and the men trousers and shirts. What they have on when we weren’t there –if anything – I don’t know.’ He did not take a photograph because he had a small number of photographic plates with him. Five days later he photographed a group of women on the Island of Mabuaig.

Haddon, 1888, Calico gowns, Mabuiag, Torres Strait. British Museum number Oc,B41.23. Reproduced here under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The following day he landed on Tudu, renamed Warrior Island in the early 1800s because of violent clashes between the islanders and the European sailors. He wrote in his journal that he persuaded the islanders

to get up a koppa-koppa or native dance for us [but] we had great difficulty in getting them to take off their respective garbs of civilisation which we knew to be (mistakenly) donned in our honour, for before we reached the village the chief [Maino] sent a man on in advance, as he subsequently admitted, to tell the women to put on the calico gowns.

In 1901, he recalled the expedition in Head-hunters, black, white and brown and described what happened when they reached Mawatta:

Haddon, 1901, Head-hunters; black, white, and brown, p.111-112.

The presence of the Masingara “bushmen” is important because it establishes contact with populations who lived beyond the colony. His use of ‘absolute savages’ has to be read in terms of his intention to explore thoroughly ‘uncivilised’ regions inhabited by forest dwellers at a much earlier stage of social and economic development, which, Haddon argued elsewhere, could be explained by the innate conservatism of extremely isolated populations. In this context, the ‘hideous white gown’ becomes a metaphor for the disastrous consequences of contact with Europeans.

The Aran Islands were different. Haddon thought the Islands the most remarkable islands he had visited and included this  description of the people in a commentary he wrote for a slide show he presented in Dublin in 1890:

The people too are a fine handsome race, upright men of good physique, ruddy complexion, fair hair and blue grey eyes, there is a large proportion of nice looking and often very pretty girls. The men wear a whitish clothes made from the locally made flannel, the costume may be entirely white or the trousers & waistcoat may be blue, coats are not often worn. The women mostly affect shirts dyed with√^of a beautiful russet – red colour. In the west of Ireland the men wear boots & the women go bare footed, here both sexes xx wear native made sandles, ‘pompooties’, which they make for themselves out of cow-skins. (Haddon, 1890, ‘The Aran Islands’ manuscript, Haddon Library, Cambridge).

A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019 © curator.ie). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin.

The islanders’ refusal to adopt the ‘Galway Suit’ and its female equivalent materialised, literally, the failure of the colony to disrupt folk life in the islands. Eight years later, however, the ‘Galway suit’ and cheap Paisley shawls had made inroads and Synge found himself having to persuade islanders to wear ‘national dress’ while posing for photographs. That brings Douglas Hyde into the picture.  

The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation

In November 1892, Douglas Hyde addressed the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin and his treatment of ‘national dress’ is strikingly similar to Haddon’s campaign against the ‘hideous calico gown.’ Hyde asked his audience why people in Connemara wear home-spun tweed, but those in the midlands prefer imported clothes from English cities. He then issued this call to action:

Hyde, 1892, in Charles Gavan Duffy’s The Revival of Irish Literature (1894), p. 158.

Hyde, like Haddon before him, wanted to strip the natives of their shoddy, colonial dress. Again, this was not a coincidence. Between 1892 and 1895, Haddon worked alongside Hyde and members of Belfast Naturalist’s Field Club to build a folklore movement in the city. Haddon listed Hyde in his ‘little black book’ of regular contacts and, in 1895, he invited Hyde to join an excursion to the Aran Islands organised by the Irish Field Club Union.

Conclusion

Haddon and Synge visited islands where indigenous populations were under pressure from Anglo-Saxon colonisation and they adopted dress as a code for the extent of Anglicisation or, on the contrary, a refusal to be assimilated as colonial subjects. Asking islanders to remove their ‘Galway suits’ and ‘calico gowns’ was, according to Hyde, an act of necessary de-Anglicisation that places Haddon ‘the Head-hunter’ and Synge ‘the playboy’ on the same side in the fight waged by cultural nationalists and literary modernists against Anglo-Saxon colonisation.

The field club movement emerges as a key contact point between Haddon, Synge, and Hyde. Indeed, Haddon, frustrated by the failure of the emerging discipline of academic anthropology to engage with his radical anticolonial agenda, jumped the university wall and pursued his activism through the field clubs and other extra mural networks. The role the Dublin club played in bringing the ‘head-hunter’ and ’the playboy’ together will feature in part two of this blog.

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’: twenty five photographs that change the history of anthropology

Top: Anon. 1890. Green, Lane, Haddon, Beamish. Digital print of cyanotype. MAA P.48150.ACH2, with permission of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge.

Bottom: Aran Islanders approach the S.S. Fingal in their currachs off Inis Meáin (Inishmaan – Middle Island), where islanders ferried people and goods ashore. The coast of Inis Oírr (South Island) is visible in the background. NLI VTls000284434_005 (detail), with permission of the National Library of Ireland.

Intro

Alfred Cort Haddon and Andrew Francis Dixon spent a week in the Aran Islands in 1890. They documented the glacio-karst landscape, the people, their mode of life, beliefs, customs, folklore and numerous archaeological sites. Haddon summarised the work as follows:

I can’t tell you all the excursions we made in Aran. it wd be as tedious for you to read as for me to write suffice it to say that Dixon & I left very little unseen & what with sketches & photographs we have a good deal on paper.

An entry in Alfred Cort Haddon’s journal for July/Aug 1890.

On his return to Dublin he used ten of Dixon’s photographs in a slideshow titled ‘The Aran Islands’, the first of a series that included ‘Ethnographical Studies in the West of Ireland’ in the Anthropological Institute in 1894 and ‘On the People of Western Ireland and their Mode of Life’ at a meeting of the anthropological section of the British Association later in the same year.

The exhibition is organised around Haddon’s first slideshow and develops ideas explored in my book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage, which accompanies the exhibition and provides the focus of an RAI Research Seminar in the Royal Anthropological Institute on 31 October 2023.

A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. © curator.ie.

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’

Haddon’s first slideshow is recreated in this exhibition with photographs reproduced from digital scans of original negatives and first generation prints, most of which are exhibited for the first time. I discovered Dixon’s negatives in a storage space under the ‘Old’ Anatomy Theatre in Trinity College, Dublin in 2014. It seems the negatives were put on a shelf after R. J. Welch ‘photoshopped’ them and sent them back to Haddon and Dixon in 1890, where they remained undiscovered until 2014.

In 2019 I commissioned Ciarán Rooney | Filmbank to print a new set of photographs from digital scans of the negatives. The photographs form the core of A Very English Savage but photography is very restricted in academic publishing, so, as a curator by trade, I developed this aspect of my research as an exhibition of early social documentary photography. My intention is to show that Haddon was an artist who adopted photography as a form of ethnography and spent the next ten years pioneering the art of visual anthropology.

Top: the Haddon Dixon negative in a slotted box alongside an ‘instantaneous‘ quarter plate camera and the lightproof ‘slide‘ that held a negative, a 3¼ × 4¼ (83 × 108mm) glass slide covered in photographic emulsion. each negative was inserted into a slide before it was mounted on the back of the camera. The front of the slide was withdrawn and the negative exposed to light by removing the the cover of the lens. The operation was reversed and the slides stored for processing in a dark room or photographic laboratory. The photograph of the people of Inis Meáin is most likely a first generation contact print made by placing the processed negative on a piece of paper covered with photographic emulsion. This photograph was probably the last taken from the negative before Ciarán Rooney scanned the negative and printed a digital photograph in 2014. Bottom: the storage space under the ‘Old’ Anatomy Theatre in Trinity College, Dublin where the box of negatives lay undiscovered between 1890 and 2014. The infamous ‘Skull Passage’ on the right. (Photos: © curator.ie)

The social documentary quality and archaeological focus of ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow disrupts the prevailing association between photography in anthropology and the scientific racism materialised in anthropometric portraits from the same era, which Andrei Nacu explored in his ‘Grid’ exhibition in the RAI in September 2023. Haddon intended to be disruptive. He had no interest in physical anthropology. His slideshow was a synthetic study of place-work-folk, a formula Patrick Geddes adapted from the social survey model Frédéric le Play developed in France.

A. C. Haddon. 1892. Michael Faherty, and two women, Inishmaan. Digital print of a silver gelatine print that Charles R. Browne pasted into an album in 1897. TCD MS10961-4_0007, courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin. Haddon took another shot of this group and reproduced it as Figure 7 on Plate XXIII of “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway.” TCD MS10961-4_0007, courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin. 

The sociological framing of Haddon’s ethnography was unprecedent and inaugurated a formal opposition between ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography and what Haddon, writing in a photo-ethnographic manifesto in the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, called the ‘stiff profiles required by the anatomist’. As brief as it is, this statement matters for two reasons. One, it registered Haddon’s long battle with the anatomists who dominated anthropology in the 1890s. Two, it expressed his commitment to visual anthropology as a sociologically oriented alternative to physical anthropology and, as such, an ethnographic vehicle for anti-colonialism activism. 

Haddon set up this selfied ofCharles R. Browne measuring Tom Connelly’s skull while Haddon enters the information into specially prepared index cards.Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin. 

Sure, Haddon engaged in skull measuring in a mobile version of Francis Galton’s anthropometric laboratory when he returned to the Aran Islands in 1892. He also produced ‘stiff portraits’ as he tried to establish himself in a field dominated by Galton and his associates, including Alexander Macalister, Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge and President of the Anthropological institute from 1893 to 1894. In 1893, Macalister employed Haddon as a part-time lecturer in physical anthropology and, in 1895, they managed an ethnographic survey in the village of Barley. Haddon took photographs following guidelines Galton drew up for the UK Ethnographic Survey.

The contrast with ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow couldn’t be starker and that situates Haddon’s experiment in a wider struggle between ‘culturals’ and ‘physicals’ – as E. B. Tylor (1893) labelled them – for control of anthropology. Despite his ‘anthropometric’ associations Haddon was a ‘cultural’. Anthropometric portraits play little or no part in the slideshows he performed between 1890 and 1895. Instead, the slideshows document the study of folk, their customs, beliefs, art and dance across time and space, culminating in experiments in colour photography and ethnographic filmmaking in the Torres Strait in 1898.

These experiments are signposted here with digital prints of the oldest surviving photograph of Skellig Michael (1868) and a copy Haddon made in 1890, a study of folk dance by Clara Patterson (1893) and a still from Haddon’s film of the last dance of the Malu Zogo-Le (1898). John Millington Synge followed Haddon to the Aran Islands in 1898 and is represented by a photograph that registers Haddon’s influence on literary modernism and cultural nationalism in Ireland in the 1890s, which, in turn, indexes Haddon’s modernism.

William Mercer. 1868. St Michael’s Church and Cell. Digital print of silver gelatine print. Mercer photographed archaeological sites for Wyndham-Quin, 3rd Earl of Dunraven, whose Notes on Irish Architecture (1875) Margaret Stokes brought to print after his death in 1871. MSA 239, with permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

Clara Patterson. 1893. Green Gravel. UFTM L2239-3, with permission of National Museum of Northern Ireland

A. C. Haddon. 1898. The Dance of the Malu Zogo-Le. Digital print of a still from the short film Haddon shot on the island of Mer (Murray), Torres Strait. Permission of National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

J. M. Synge. 1898/2009. Islanders of Inishmaan. Digital print from scan of glass plate negative (digitisation by Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton, Gill Whelan, printed by Daniel Scully). TCD MS11332_28_b courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

In sum, ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow marks the beginning of a form of anthropology that we would recognise today as visual anthropology. Unfortunately for Haddon, his photo-ethnographic manifesto entered the modern era just as anthropology was becoming what Margaret Mead called ‘a discipline of words’. Furthermore, a historiographical focus on Haddon’s career in zoology obscured his interest in art and photography and so masked the beginning of visual anthropology.

An installation shot of the ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London. The group of photographs on the right recreates Haddon’s 1890 slideshow with prints from digital scans of the original negative. Photo Andrei Nacu.

Note

The links between Haddon the ‘Head-hunter’ and Synge the ‘Playboy’ will feature in a separate blog.

in partnership with

‘The Bolex Boys’

John Lynch bought a 16mm Bolex cine camera in 1971 and began filming the end of a way of life in rural North Kerry from his vantage point in the creamery he managed in Cooraclarig. I met Lynch fifty years later and began recording his account of the start of his journey as an independent film maker. Along the way I met Michael Mulcahy, a sound engineer by trade who joined Lynch in 1973 and sealed their film making partnership by replacing the 8mm camera he bought in 1964 with a 16mm Bolex camera.

They documented social and cultural life in North Kerry over five decades and their choice of a 16mm Bolex signalled a professionalism that separates their film making from home movies made by amateurs. Their collected work constitutes a remarkable archive of independent, observational cinema that is unique in an Irish context.

John Lynch (photo Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie © 2023)

Michael Mulcahy (photo Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie © 2023)

John Lynch and Eamon Keane (photo Brian MacMahon | John Lynch © 2023)

My interest in their work is grounded in visual anthropology as defined by Paul Hockings, who edited Principles in Visual Anthropology in 1975. Hocking was involved in filming The Village in Dún Chaoin in 1967 and he presented it as a manifesto for observational cinema as a definitive form of visual anthropology. Mark Carty had a 16mm camera and, with three sound recordists, filmed life in the village as it happened over a summer weekend. They edited the results back to 70 minutes and released The Village in 1968 without commentary, leaving it up to the viewers to make up their own minds about they had observed. The lack of recorded dialogue and Keane’s soundtrack on The Way I Remember It – added in 1978 – sets the two films apart, although Keane’s soundtrack is less a commentary than a multilayered and mischievous soundtrack that adds a stream of folklore into the mix. The films have more in common however. The Village covers many of the same subjects that Lynch filmed around Listowel four years later and, although Lynch was an insider who was influenced by art house cinema, both were interested in exploring the process of change in traditional communities through the medium of film.

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The fascinating thing about Lynch and Mulcahy is that they continued to film the same community over five decades. Equally remarkable is the collection of film and sound equipment that they collected. They have kept the Bolex cameras they started out with – they are still in working order – but modernised their operation as film yielded to video and video entered the digital age. Their studios record those changes in a remarkable collection of things as much as films. That triggered a search for a repository for a collection of observational cinema and film making equipment that may have been local in origin but is now of national significance in terms of the history of cinema in Ireland.

Cara Trant, Executive Director of Kerry Writers’ Museum in Listowel came on board in 2023. She secured funding for a preliminary curatorial project from the government department responsible for the arts, heritage and media, which operates the Regional Museums Exhibition Scheme. I had referred to Lynch and Mulcahy in conversation as the ‘Bolex’ boys and that became the title of the project. Julien Dorgere, the Super8 Specialist in Galway, began work on the digital restoration of the film in September alongside work on on converting a gallery in the museum into a multi media space that incorporated a mini cinema.

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Photos of International Storytelling Festival are © Noel Sweeney/sweeneynmedia

Lynch and Mulcahy showed a preview of the restored version of The Way I Remember It in September as part of the International Storytelling Festival in Kerry Writer’s Museum and a large crowd attended, including a number of young film makers who were interested in independent documentary making and analogue cinema. The fully restored films will be premiered at the opening ofThe Bolex Boys in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October.

in partnership with

and supported by

a very English savage: a small book that will change a lot

The cover photo shows Prof Alfred Cort Haddon sitting next to Dr Rev Dr Samuel, President of the Royal Irish Academy, and a fellow home rule supporter who also shared a family history of anti-slavery and humanitarian activism (with permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA).

Berghahn Books has just provided me with a typeset copy of my book on Haddon, which is due out in September as the fifth volume in the Anthropology’s Ancestors series edited by Aleksandar Bošković. Details are available on the Berghahn website. In this blog I discuss the choice of title and the origin of the project.

What’s in a title?

This book is an innovative account of one of the least understood characters in the history of anthropology. Going against the grain of most scholarship, I argue that Haddon stood in solidarity with the victims of colonialism, and campaigned for a humanitarian anthropology inspired by the anti-slavery activism of his grandparents and his anarcho-utopian associates. His project was considered too radical in the 1890s, and he was marginalised by the scientific community in England.

A pivotal moment in this story is a speech Haddon gave in Ipswich in 1895, just after the Tories and their unionist allies won a general election caused by defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill. He provoked outrage in the press when he publicly declared his support for the political campaign to end British rule in Ireland, and the cultural campaign to decolonise Irish society and other colonies. In the months before he made the speech, Haddon gave a number of slideshows that publicised the scandal of evictions in the Aran Islands.

Evictions in the Aran Islands in 1894 and 1895 caused outrage in the press and, Haddon responded with a series of public slideshows on life in the western isles of Ireland.

Haddon’s speech also drew on his experience of native life in the Torres Strait, and the telling of that story generated the title of this book. His experience of Papuan dance in 1888 triggered a fascination with the function of dance as social ritual across space and time. To understand the symbolism of Papuan dance he had to discover the savage within, and to become an ethnologist he had to become that savage, albeit a very English version of that savage. Adopting this as his anthropological persona, he stood in solidarity with other savages and fought against the genocidal consequences of colonialism.

A. C. Haddon, The Dance of the Zogo Le,1898. Digital scan of a frame from the short film that Haddon made on the island of Mer, Torres Strait. Permission of National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

That struggle continues at several flashpoints across the globe. Amazon activist Celia Xakriaba took to YouTube to call for solidarity with indigenous peoples in a new era of legislated genocide. Her short video captures the spirit of Haddon’s unrelenting criticism of legitimated murder in the colonies; the accidental or deliberate, slow or fast genocides that were the inevitable consequence of colonialism. That activism was what Haddon thought it meant to be an anthropologist in the 1890s, and that claim sets a very English savage apart from most histories of anthropology.

Activist Celia Xakriabá (2020) denounces “legislated genocide” on the Tribal Voice channel.

The head-hunter and the playboy

The other major claim is that Haddon influenced John Millington Synge, which contradicts the common sense that the colonial scientist and literary modernist were on opposite sides in the political and cultural struggle to end British rule in Ireland. Yet Synge joined Haddon in the Dublin Naturalist Field Club in 1886 – when Synge was fourteen years of age – and I trace the consequences of that encounter for both, highlighting the fact that Synge makes several references to Haddon’s work, and tried to replicate Haddon’s photo-ethnographic experiments in the Aran Islands.

A. C. Haddon, Michael Faherty, and two women, Inishmaan, Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names, 1892. Digital scan of silver gelatine print (Tim Keeffe, Ciarán Walsh, Ciarán Rooney, 2011). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

Digital scan of original glass plate negative of a photograph Synge took on Inis Meáin (Inishmaan) in the Aran Islands in 1898. (Tim Keefe, 2009, courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin).

Connecting Haddon to Synge brings me back to the research that triggered my fascination with Haddon. In 2009, I curated an exhibition of Synge’s photographs and brought it to le Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2010. I was surprised by the popularity of the exhibition until Sheila Pratschke, director at the centre, reminded me that Parisians had always embraced Synge as one of their own, and a ‘Sauvage’. A very English savage brings this curatorial project full circle, and provides the foundation for further work on how an English head-hunter led an Irish playboy to the Aran Islands.

TCD to announce return of ancestral remains to Inishbofin

Marie Coyne, 2022, St Colman’s Monastery and burial ground.

It is expected that the board of TCD will decide today (22 February 2023) to return to Inishbofin the ancestral remains Haddon and Dixon stole in 1890.

We were unable to achieve the return of the Árann and St Finian Bay remains as part of this deal, but there is now a procedure in place in TCD to submit claims in respect of these remains:

It should also be stressed that this document focuses specifically on the Inishbofin case though it has potential relevance for future requests from other communities of origin in Ireland seeking the return and reburial of other human remains in the Haddon/Dixon collection including those collected from Finian’s Bay, Co. Kerry and the Aran Islands as well as other human remains’ collections at TCD. 

https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/trinity-college-dublin-launches-legacies-review-working-group-/

It’s been a long campaign that is now drawing to a close, and,to put this decision in perspective see:

’Normalising the Abnormal: Trinity College Dublin Decides what to do with its Collection of Stolen Skulls‘, AJEC (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures) Blog: Academic Research in the Anthropology of Europe: http://ajecblog.berghahnjournals.com/normalising-the-abnormal-trinity-college-dublin-decides-what-to-do-with-its-collection-of-stolen-skulls/

An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley.

What does the removal of the skeleton of Charles Byrne from public display in London mean for Trinity College Dublin with regard to its retention of 24 skulls stolen from community burial grounds in Inishbofin, the Aran Islands and St. Finian’s Bay, Kerry? The repatriation of these remains has become a test case for the colonial legacies project initiated by Prof Ciarán O’Neill in 2020 and the question now is whether the issue of human remains in collections in London and Dublin tells us anything about the impending judgement on Berkeley’s involvement in slavery.

The trustees of the Hunterian Museum in London have given in into public pressure and decided not to display the remains of Charles O’Brien – an Irish giant known as Charles Byrne ­– in the museum when it reopens in March 2023, after a five-year revamp. The bad news is that the museum will retain his skeleton and make it available for ‘bona fide’ medical research, despite O’Brien’s wish that his body should be sealed in a lead coffin and buried at sea rather than fall into the hands of body snatchers working for anatomists like Hunter.

The opening sequence of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant documentary made by Ronin Films for the BBC.

Cornelius Magrath was O’Brien’s anatomical twin and his remains have been on display in the Anatomy Museum in TCD since his death in 1760, at the age of 23. Magrath died in the care of the School of Physic (Medicine) TCD and, unlike O’Brien, there is no record of what he wanted to happen to his body. Legend has it that his body was snatched from a wake, dissected in secret, his skeleton macerated and placed on display.

In 2017, Joe Duffy campaigned on RTÉ to have Magrath’s remains buried, but the failure to prove that the body had been snatched was decisive and the skeleton remained in its display case in the Anatomy Museum. Shortly afterwards Chris Nikkel and Brendan Holland filmed part of their documentary The Giant Gene in the museum and a key question for Holland, as a contemporary Irish giant, was whether he would like his bones to go on public display like Magrath in Dublin and O’Brien in London.

Brendan Holland in the Anatomy Museum TCD during the filming of The Giant Gene for BBC. Photo Chris Nikkel.

The decision to take O’Brien’s bones off display sets a new ethical threshold for anatomy museums and, in the absence of Irish legislation governing this area, has implications for TCD in relation to its retention of 24 stolen skulls in the Haddon Dixon Collection. They are the subject of an decade-long repatriation campaign and every person living on Inishbofin has signed a petition seeking the immediate return for burial of the remains of their ancestors, along with over 900 people who signed an online version of the petition.

The board of TCD rejected their petition last December and decided instead to consult with the community about what happens to the remains, disregarding the skulls stolen in the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay despite hard evidence that they were part of the same grave robbing haul. The colonial legacies team in TCD accepted that evidence at a meeting held two months previously with community representatives and their research team but changed their position after the opening council meeting in October, citing the lack of sufficiently robust evidence in relation to the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay. Inishbofin did not appear on the agenda of the Council in October or November and did not feature in the Provost’s reports or under any other business. The only information available about the Board meeting in December is an agenda item stating that the board was to receive a verbal update from the Provost on the Trinity Legacies Review Group and that the Senior Dean, Professor Eoin O’Sullivan was to join the meeting for this item.

The Haddon Dixon Repatriation delegation gathers in TCD ahead of a meeting with Provost Linda Doyle and her colonial legacies team. L-R: Pat O’Leary, St Finian’s Bay community representative, Cathy Galvin, journalist and poet, Pegi Vail anthropologist and film maker at New York University, and Ciarán Walsh, curator.ie

TCD did not publicise the fact that no decision had been made to return the skulls from Inishbofin, and it is far from clear whether the repatriation of the remains is an outcome TCD considers open to negotiation. Members of a committee working on the development of the Anatomy Museum set out the terms of the consultation process in a letter sent to the repatriation project in August 2022, and the bottom line is that they regard the stolen skulls as archaeological rather than anthropological in origin, and, as such, may be retained by TCD. Furthermore, the committee made it clear that is does not intend to hand over the remains and, it appears, their stance was confirmed as college policy by the Board in December, although the minutes of that meeting will not be released until approved at the January 2023 meeting. That leaves very little scope for any discussion of repatriation in the proposed consultation.

Inishbofin community burial ground with St Colman’s Monastery in the background. The remains of the islanders’ ancestors rest in the area to the left of the monastery, and the remains held in TCD will be buried here when they are repatriated.

The Anthropological Collection in the ‘Skull Passage‘ in 2017, a service corridor at the back of the old anatomy theatre in TCD where the Haddon Dixon is displayed. The ‘skull passage‘ is likely to remain the repository for ‘special’ research collections like the Haddon Dixon and other ethnological collections.

Removing the remains of O’Brien from public display may focus public attention on the issue of repatriation in relation to museum collections in general and the ongoing saga of the stolen skulls of Inishbofin in particular, but it provides TCD with a precedent for retention. The Anatomy Museum committee will probably propose that they will not display the remains, and, like the Hunterian and other anatomy museums, will make the them available to ‘bona fide’ researchers.

Retention, however, has major implications for the colonial legacies project formally established in 2021, especially as the board of TCD will shortly consider whether or not to rename the Berkeley Library because of Berkeley’s involvement in slavery. The colonial legacies team was confident that the repatriation of the Haddon Dixon Collection would pave the way for this and other more difficult decisions but they were outmanoeuvred by the Anatomy Museum committee last October. The board fudged the issue in December by not making a decision in principle on the return of the stolen skulls and announcing instead its plan to consult – not negotiate – with the community about what happens the collection.

The board does not have the same wriggle room in relation to the Berkeley Library and internal opposition to the move have been well flagged. Should the board side with the opposition, one has to wonder whether the people who govern TCD do not have a problem with its colonial legacies as an aspect of its traditions and institutional identity. If so, one has to wonder whether the colonial legacies project will become an academic exercise, and, if not, maybe repatriation will become possible …

is dona linn an briseadh seo … we regret the break in transmission

Work on this blog was temporarily suspended while Ciarán Walsh was completing on his thesis (2020) and translating his doctoral research into a book for Berghahn Books NY (2022). Normal transmission will resume shortly.

“is dona linn an briseadh seo” was the dreaded phrase ushered by presenters on the Irish television whenever a technical hitches interrupted transmission.

Anarchy in the UK: Haddon, Home Rule and Brexit

The following is an abstract of a PowerPoint presentation that I gave at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Folklore Society.  I devised the piece in response to a call for papers that explored the relationship between  “Folklore and the Nation,” taking the format from a slideshow on photography and folklore that Haddon presented in 1895.

This presentation represented the first results of a four-year investigation of the “skull measuring business” in Ireland in the 1890s. That project was funded by the Irish Research Council and Shanahan Research Group in association with Maynooth University and the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin.

The presentation develops ideas that were first presented to the Irish Conference on Folklore and Ethnology in Belfast in  November 2018.

____________________________________________________________

Abstract

This presentation deals with ethnicity, nationalism and folklore, drawing on a forgotten anti-Imperial movement in British folklore. It begins with an anti-colonial speech delivered by Alfred Haddon in Ipswich in 1895. Haddon was aligned with the volkskunde wing of the folklore movement in Ireland and opened his speech by acknowledging nationalist efforts to disengage from political and economic union with Britain. Haddon entered anthropology through folklore, equating the destruction of native customs in subjugated territories with the loss of personal identity, ethnicity, and, ultimately, nationhood. Haddon spoke to Patrick Geddes and Havelock Ellis about reconstituting anthropology as a vehicle for radical anti-colonial activism. They were inspired by the anarchist geography of Kropotkin, the radical ethnology of Reclus, and the “Zeitgeist” of Gomme (FLS). This conference looks like the place  to remember an engagement between Irish nationalists, English folklorists and stateless anarchists /ethnologists on the brink of Ireland’s exit from union with Britain.

Folklore and nation in Britain and Ireland (forthcoming)

This presentation has been reworked for the opening chapter in an exploration  the relationship between folklore, folklife and unions in Folklore and nation in Britain and Ireland edited by Carina Hart and Matthew Cheeseman and due for publication by Routledge, Taylor and Francis in 2021.

I also developed the themes explored in this presentation as part of my docctoral research into the skull-measuring business in Ireland in the 1890s, which was incorporated as the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, a Eugenics facility that opened in TCD in June 1891.

At the same time however, an unlikeley confederation of utopians, anarchists and social reformers used folk-lore – they used the hyphenated version – to challenge the dominance of anatomical anthropology and the scientific-racism that underpinned much of it. That conflict is one of two main themes that I explore my thesis.

The other is Haddon’s pioneering use of photography, which, combined with a radical feminism, led to a photographic collaboration with Clara Patterson, a member of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club, who documented the games that children played in rural districts in County Down, Ireland.

I completed my research in June 2020 and was awarded a PhD by Maynooth University in September. The combination of anarchist-influenced social reform, folklore and photography is explored in Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement in Hart and Cheeseman’s collection of essays.

I present a radical new version of the early history of organised anthropology in Ireland and the UK, which explores many of the issues thrown up by the Black Lives Matter movement and humanitarian campaigns like Tribal Voice.

My intention is simple enough: to rattle the skeletons in the anatomist’s cupboard and use this study of race in an historical context to create a scientifically robust platform to challenge racism in a contemporary context, creating an interface between academic anthropology and civil society activism by employing a range of public engagement strategies. This blog is one of those strategies.

For further information contact curator.ie@gmail.com

Knock-Knock-Knocking on Heaven’s Door

The Man With The Magic Lantern

 

The Man: Fr Bartholomew Cavanagh ( 1821-1897), Parish Priest of Knock and Aughamore in 1879. This is man who may have engineered an apparition using a magic lantern. The site of the apparition is visible in the background. Photo: Knock Shrine

 

The Pope is going to Knock …

where the Blessed Virgin appeared to a group of local people139 years ago on this date (August 21, 1879).

Sceptics have always suspected that some form of optical device was used to trick the villagers into believing that they had been visited by the Virgin Mary, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist. One such sceptic was the Rev Dr Francis Lennon, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Maynooth.

He investigated the possible use of a magic  lantern, an early form of image projector powered by a gas lantern (limelight) or an electric arc light from the 1860s onwards. Lennon was working on behalf of a Commission of Enquiry appointed by the church to collect eyewitness statements and verify that an apparition had occurred.

 

The Magic Lantern. Photo: Sonya Tyrna

 

The Pope’s endorsement of Knock as a recognised site of Marian apparition is a fairly clear-cut indication of the outcome of that inquiry but, from the very beginning, some people have suspected that (1) the apparition was in fact a photographic slide that was projected unto a wall of the church just as it was getting dark and (2) the event was engineered by the local parish priest.

There is plenty of literature about the so-called “Magic Lantern Theory,” the best texts being an article by Paul Carpenter in the New Hibernia Review (2011) and an academic treatment of the apparition by Eugene Hynes (2009). There is plenty of material online both from a devotional and a hoaxer perspective.

Carpenter is available online and is probably the best place to start. He gives a comprehensive account of arguments for and against the use of a projector.  Hynes, according to Carpenter, is one of the few social historians to critically examine the “Magic Lantern Theory” in an effort to determine what the witnesses actually saw.

 

The Apparition: The Basilica mosaic depicting the apparition of 1879. It was designed by P. J. Lynch and crafted by artisan mosaic makers in Italy. It was unveiled in 2016. Photo: Knock Shrine.

 

This blog deals with two key pieces pieces of evidence that were missed by both Carpenter and Hynes.

The first is an account by James Hack Tuke of a visit to Knock six months or so after the apparition. Tuke is in no doubt that a lantern projector was used.

The second is a story I was told by the grandson of Thomas Mason, the man who rented a projector to the parish priest of Knock at the time of the apparition. Mason couldn’t prove that his projector had been used to create an “apparition.”

Neither account definitively supports or contradicts the “Magic Lantern Theory” but they do add nuance to a story that is bound to surface in response to the current Papal visit to Knock.

 

Tuke Visits The Scene Of The Apparition

Tuke visited Knock in March 1880 in response to reports that ‘an apparition … is stated to have appeared last August, when the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph and a figure dressed as a Bishop (called now St. John) were seen with an altar etc. etc. depicted in the evening upon the east end of the church’ (my emphasis).

Tuke described the visit in great detail in a letter to his daughters at home in England. The Right Hon. Sir Edward Fry, Tuke’s biographer, introduced the letter as ‘a curious bit of narrative’ that would relieve an otherwise unending tale of distress and misery in Ireland.

Tuke had been involved in the distribution of famine relief in Donegal and Connaught during the Great Famine or An Gorta Mór of 1845-9. He was called on again when the agricultural crisis of 1879 tipped the region into famine, the Second Famine or An Gorta Beag as it was called. Tuke arrived in the west of Ireland in February 1880 and spent six weeks organising the delivery of emergency food aid to starving cottiers in Donegal and Connaught.

 

 

Sketch showing the distribution of relief tickets in the turf market in Westport. From the Illustrated London News, March 6, 1880. The man in the top hat may be Tuke. Photo: Mayo Library

 

The apparition in Knock made the news in January 1880. The first account was published in the Tuam News, a newspaper founded by Canon Ulick Bourke of Claremorris. Bourke’s mother was a cousin of the Archbishop MacHale of Tuam but Bourke is remembered in his own right as an important Gaelic scholar, activist, and writer. The  Knock “story” was written by John McPhilpin, Bourke’s nephew, and can only be read as the archdiocese’s version of what happened in Knock in August 1879.

 

Four illustrations, captioned “The alleged apparitions at Knock”, depicting Fr. Kavanagh [sic], Pastor of Knock; Fr. Kavanagh’s house; exterior and interior of Knock chapel. From The Graphic,  July 17, 1880. Source / Caption: Mayo Library

 

Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, who set up the Commission of Enquiry, found that the words of the witnesses were “trustworthy and satisfactory.”  The status of the apparition was settled and Knock was quickly framed as the site of a Marian apparition, one of 12 recognised by the Catholic church between 1531 and 1933.

Tales of miraculous cures abounded and hundreds of pilgrims descended on Knock. Tuke described the village ‘as a dirty, small cluster of houses, with a church on a hill.’ A thriving ‘fair’ was in progress in which books, images etc. were being sold to crowds of pilgrims who were doing the rounds.

 

This photograph was taken in 1880. Pilgrims gathered at the gable where the apparition was seen. The wall had to be covered with a wooden screen to prevent pilgrims from removing the plaster.  Photo: Knock Shrine.

 

Tuke thought that the business of the apparition was a strange affair and ‘impossible to account for, unless in the first some trick has been played …’ Tuke suggests that a lantern slide projector was used to ‘depict’ the Blessed Virgin as if she was appearing in a ‘vision.’

‘I confess’ he wrote’ that as I heard it described the day before by another priest, it gave me the feeling that it was like the effect of a dissolving view, especially as he said there were lights running up and down the wall (just like the last scene in a lantern slide).’ Tuke’s account has to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Father Cavanagh was the only cleric in Knock on the evening of the 21 August 1879 but he did not  witness the event. Mary McLoughlin, his housekeeper, did and testified as much when the Commission of Enquiry convened in October 1879.

She described how she was passing the church and noticed what she thought was a group of statues bathed in a strange light. She continued on her way but returned with a friend and realised that there was something extraordinary about the figures. She sent for other neighbours to witness the scene.

She then went to Father Cavanagh to tell him of ‘the beautiful things that were to be seen at the gable of the chapel’ but ‘He appeared to make nothing of what [she] said, and, consequently, he did not go.’  It was a decision he would struggle with as word of the apparition spread but the main point here is that the event–the apparition–was not witnessed by any priest.

 

The Magic Lantern in action. Source: Martyn Jolly.

 

Tuke’s suggestion that another, unidentified priest had witnessed the event is, at best, misleading. It is possible that Tuke was talking to a priest involved in testing the theory that a magic lantern or some sort of optical device had been used to create the apparition. The Commission of Enquiry asked Francis Lennon, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Maynooth, to investigate the possibility that a magic lantern was used, presumably by Cavanagh although that is not stated anywhere.

Lennon was a sceptic. He did not believe that supernatural agency was at work in Knock. He conducted experiments with a projector at the site of the apparition and concluded that a lantern could not have been used. The layout of the site, Lennon argued, made a projection unrealistic and he proposed the skillful application of a fluorescent substance to the gable wall as an alternative device.

 

The site of the apparition. The witnesses stood on the road to the west of the school. The windows in the western wall were the most likely place to put a projector.

 

Despite this, the “Magic Lantern Theory” was quickly adopted by sceptics like Tuke and Michael McCarthy,  an anti-clerical nationalist and author. McCarthy and Tuke were alarmed at the take over of of social institutions by a politically aggressive and increasingly powerful Roman Catholic Church.

They were vocal in their opposition to it and it fuelled their subsequent opposition to Home Rule.  McCarthy published Priests and People in Ireland in 1902. It was a stinging critique of the relation between priests and people in Ireland in which McCarthy claimed (1) that witness testimonies had been filtered by the clergy and (2) that the witnesses had seen a composite image disseminated by a projection device hidden in the sacristy.

There is plenty of circumstantial evidence in the witness statements to support the use of a lantern projector. The vision lasted for over an hour, during which time it remained static and, unlike other Marian apparitions, the Blessed Virgin did not speak to the witnesses.  The figures reminded some witnesses of statues. The light surrounding them sparkled in the rain. It sounds very like a description of an outdoor projection of religious imagery.

Tuke’s statement is, at best, hearsay but there is a bigger problem with it. Tuke was meticulous in terms of the accuracy of his reports of conditions in the west of Ireland. His sources were identified so that their information could be checked. Tuke did not identify the priest he spoke with in Knock and that omission makes his statement far less credible.

 

The Man Who Provided The Priest With A Magic Lantern

The apparition in Knock coincided with the a massive increase in the availability of photographic slides and improved projectors. There was  a corresponding increase in the use of this technology to inform and influence the general public. There was an equally dramatic increase in public demand for photographic slide shows.

The parish priest in Knock might be described as an early adopter of those technologies and the apparition in  Knock may have been the accidental result of an experimental slideshow. The really interesting thing about this is that Thomas Mason, the man who provided the priest with a projector, has left an account of that transaction and its consequences.  This may be the key to understanding the ‘beautiful likenesses’ described by Mrs. Hugh Flatley one of the eyewitnesses.

 

A lantern slide depicting a scene from the Bible. A similar slide may have been used in Knock. Mary McLoughlin initially thought that Father Cavanagh had left decorative figures from Dublin standing against the gable. Photo: Pinterest

 

Photographic slides transformed the use of lantern projectors in public as a medium for entertainment, education, and political campaigning. The Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia invented a system for printing positive photographic images on glass in 1848 and, by the 1850s, they were manufacturing and selling “Hyalotypes,” their brand of photographic glass slides.

 

A Langenheim lantern slide of the Smithsonian Institution Building under construction in 1850. Photo: Smithsonian.

 

In the 1870s and 1880s the lantern trade expanded enormously. By the 1890s over 30 companies were engaged in the production of lanterns and slides in London alone (Magic Lantern). 60 commercial photographic studios opened in Dublin between 1860 and 1870.

The Mason firm traded in scientific and optical equipment, including lantern slide projectors. The firm was established in 1780 and predated the invention of photography but, according to Edward Chandler, the Mason name has long been associated with the development of photography in Ireland.

It was, according to Chandler, one of the few firms in Dublin that provided a slide making service and ‘a religious or university lecturer could take a miscellaneous collection of photographs, prints, maps and other documents and have them made into a set of slides for projection.’

 

The building on the corner of Parliament St., Dublin that was occupied by the Mason optical business between 1780 and 1894. Photo: Edward Chandler.

 

Thomas Mason, who took over the firm in 1887, told his grandson that he had rented a lantern projector to the Parish Priest of Knock around the time of the apparition but, as he had not been in Knock at the time, he would not speculate as to whether the projector was the source of the apparition.

Given the remote location and the relative newness of the technology involved, it was, according to Mason, impossible to prove. Mason may have been referring to Prof Lennon’s experiments with a lantern projector and his conclusion that a projector could not have been used to create the effect described by the witnesses.

Despite that finding, Tuke’s curious little narrative shows that the idea that a lantern projector was the source of the apparition had become well established within a couple of months of the story breaking in January 1880. It has remained a stubborn if unresolved part of the story of Knock.

David Berman, writing in the aggressively anti-clerical Freethinker magazine, raised the issue in advance of Pope John Paul’s visit to Knock in 1979. Berman alleged that the apparition had been engineered by Fr. Cavanagh to deflect from his disagreement with local Fenians over their role in the campaign against landlords and their agents.

In 1994, Melvin Harris claimed to have revealed the secret behind the apparition of the Virgin Mary on a church wall in … Ireland’. Harris was working on TV series in which Arthur C Clarke investigated modern-day apparitions of the Virgin Mary in three distinct locations, one of which was the site of moving statues in Ballinspittle in 1985. Harris recreated Lennon’s experiments with a lantern projector on a set that replicated the site of the apparition in Knock. Despite some complications Harris managed to recreate the “apparition.”

 

That settles that then! Or does it?

Lennon, Tuke, McCarthy and all the other sceptics were, it seems, right all along: the claim that apparition was a fraud perpetrated by the parish priest is supported by the evidence available. So why is Pope Francis visiting Knock and endorsing it as a site of Marian apparition and pilgrimage?

 

Photo: Knock Shrine.

 

The first reports of the apparition in Knock sparked a popular religious movement that the church sought to exploit in its bid for power in Ireland. Archbishop McHale and Canon Bourke sought to align the pilgrimage with clerical support for a popular uprising against the landlord class and consolidate its leadership – social and political– of rural Ireland at a local level.

Tuke and McCarthy recognised this and dismissed the apparition as a fraud out of opposition to the increasing power of the Roman Catholic Church in areas like health, education, and public administration in general. The religious/political ambition of the church was manifest in attempts to develop a national Marian shrine on the site of the apparition, replicating the shrine in Lourdes.

John White argues that this caused a public split between  John McEvilly, the Archbishop of Tuam from 1881 to 1902, and the devotional writer Sister Mary Francis Clare Cusack or the Nun of Kenmare as she was known. The resulting scandal set the project back by half a century. The pilgrimage was revived in the 1930s and Knock developed into a major site of pilgrimage for true believers; the ordinary folk who put faith before scepticism no matter how much evidence is produced to support the “Magic Lantern Theory.”

Sputnik/© AP Photo / L’Osservatore Romano

 

And this is the thing: Knock is not about blind faith so much as a popular religious movement. Pope Francis, like Canon Bourke and McHale, before him, is using Knock to visibly align the institutional church with grassroots Catholicism.

The identification of St Joseph as one of the figures in the apparition is interesting in this context. St Joseph was proclaimed  a patron of the Universal Church in 1870 and has served as a model of the ordinary, pious believer; a suitable role model for the pilgrims who have done the rounds in Knock for 139 years.

It looks like the Pope is playing with smoke and mirrors – just as Prof Lennon of Maynooth suspected the creator of the original apparition of doing.

 

Works Cited :

David Berman, 1979, Papal Visit Resurrects Ireland’s Knock Legend, The Freethinker, 99, (October, 1979). 

Paul Carpenter, 2011, Mimesis, Memory, and the Magic Lantern: What Did the Knock Witnesses See? New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, 15(2), 102-120. JSTOR

Edward Chandler, 2001, Photography in Ireland: The Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Edmund Burke.

Fintan Cullen, 2002, Marketing National Sentiment: Lantern Slides of Evictions in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland. History Workshop Journal, no. 54 (2002): 162-79. JSTOR

Eugene Hynes, 2009, The Virgin in Nineteenth century Ireland. Cork University Press.

Edward Fry, 1899, James Hack Tuke: A Memoir compiled by The Right Hon. Sir Edward Fry. London and New York: MacMillan.

Michael McCarthy, 1902, Priests and People in Ireland.  London & Dublin: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent / Hodges & Figgis. (archive.org)

John McPhilpin, 1880, Apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Chapel of Knock, near Claremorris, Galway Vindicator and Connaught Advertiser, January 14.

John White, 1996, The Cusack Papers; new evidence on the Knock apparition, History Ireland, Issue 4 (Winter 1996), Volume 4. (online)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Skeleton of Cornelius Magrath: the controversy continues …

Pietro Longhi, 1757, “True portrait of the Giant Cornelio Magrat the Irishman; he came to Venice in the year 1757; born 1st January 1737, he is 7 feet tall and weighs 420 pounds. Painted on commission from the Noble Gentleman Giovanni Grimani dei Servi, Patrician of Venice.” Museo di Rezzonico, Venice. Photograph: Osvaldo Böhm.

The short life of Cornelius Magrath

Cornelius Magrath was born 5 miles from Silvermines in County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1737. During his adolescence, he developed a rare disorder of the pituitary gland that caused some of his bones to grow excessively. Between the ages of 15 and 16 Magrath went from 5 feet to 6 feet 8.75 inches in height. He was later described in the London Magazine for August 1752 as being of gigantic stature, but boyish and clumsily made.

His extraordinary appearance attracted a lot of attention and he was persuaded to exhibit himself. He was put on show in Bristol and London in 1753, before touring extensively in Europe. In 1857 he was in Italy, where his portrait was painted by Longhi (see above). In 1760 he became ill in Flanders and returned to Dublin where he died on May 16^th. He was 23 tears of age.

In 7 years Magrath had achieved considerable fame as the ‘Irish Giant’ and his death and dissection quickly became the stuff of legend. In 1833, a report claimed that he died as a result of an injury he sustained while performing as a giant in the Theatre Royal. Numerous other legends grew up around the ‘capture’ of his body by anatomists in Dublin University, Trinity College (TCD).

A promotional print engraved by Maag in Germany in 1756 to promote appearances by Magrath. This image has been produced from the negative of a photograph made by Daniel J. Cunningham in 1891. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

In 1890, Daniel J. Cunningham’s set out to establish the truth about Magrath’s stature and dispel some of the myth’s about his short life. Cunningham presented a report to the Royal Irish Academy in 1891, which remains the definitive account of the man and his skeleton. Cunningham confirmed that Magrath suffered from acromegaly and presented evidence that he was “positively deformed” as a result of this condition.

He was not the “well-built, proportioned, straight-limbed man” with pleasing and regular features as represented by Maag in 1756 (above). Swanzy built on Cunningham’s research and published a report in 1893 that confirmed significant deformation of Magrath’s eye sockets.  This is recorded by  in Longhi in his 1757 portrait, along with the disabling condition of “knock-knee” that was described by Cunningham.

In 1902, huge crowds attended a lecture on his skeleton that was given by Cunningham in Belfast. Curiosity in Magrath remains just as strong today judging by the current controversy over the retention by TCD of his skeleton. The controversy kicked off on the History Show on RTE Radio 1 and was picked up by chat show host Joe Duffy who argued that TCD should bury the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath because it had been ‘body snatched’ and his skeleton put on public display without his consent.

The Skeleton of Cornelius Magrath

The Skeleton of Cornelius Magrath is no longer on public display but is still held by the School of Anatomy in TCD. It is the most famous item in a historic collection of anatomy specimens, records, and instruments that is held in the ‘Old’ Anatomy Building. The building was decommissioned in 2014 and the collection is being resolved as part of post-grad research programme managed jointly by the School of Medicine TCD, Maynooth University, Kimmage Development Studies Centre, and the Irish Research Council.

Ciarán Walsh reconstructing the skull measuring device developed by Daniel J. Cunningham in the 1890s. The “Dublin Craniometer” is one of a number of anthropometrical instruments that were discovered when the ‘Old’ Anatomy building in Trinity College Dublin was being decommissioned in 2014. The skull, incidentally, is a plastic model. Photo: Ciarán Walsh.

I am employed as a full-time researcher on the project and resolving ethical issues relating to the retention of human remains is a major part of the work in hand. Indeed, the research proposal had to pass rigorous ethical approval procedures in Maynooth University, the School of Medicine TCD, and the IRC before I could get access to the ‘old’ Anatomy building and the collections held therein, which include the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath.

To bury or not to bury, that is the debate.

The Magrath “case” is interesting because there is no evidence that the body snatching story, however entertaining, is true. The only contemporary account of his death states simply that “Upon death, his body was carried to the Dissecting House,” but that account was probably written by either Robert Robinson, Professor of Anatomy in TCD, or Dr. George Cleghorn, the University anatomist (see Cunningham’s 1891 report to the Royal Irish Academy).

What we can say with some certainty is that Magrath died of a wasting disease (phthisis) and it is clear from the Robinson/Cleghorn account that he was receiving medical attention at the time of his death. It records that Magrath’s “complexion was miserably pale and sallow; his pulses very quick at times for a man of his extraordinary height; and his legs were swollen.” Elsewhere, it states that his pulse beat almost sixty times a minutes “on his arrival here.”  It sounds like Magrath was being cared for in the School of Medicine TCD when he died.

The body snatching legend, best described by Hooper,  has it that Magrath was being waked when medical students, egged on by Robinson, spiked the porter and made off with his body, which was immediately dissected in secret. Such a sensational body snatching could not have escaped notice and, furthermore, the dissection was both public knowledge and uncontroversial. Historians of anatomy in TCD have always believed that the body was paid for by Cleghorn and that the acquisition of the body was legitimate and ethical by the standards of the day. The problem here is that there is no documentary evidence of Magrath having consented to dissection or the permanent display of his skeleton.

The Anthropological Laboratory in TCD in 1891, from a cyanotype or blueprint of a  photograph taken by Charles R. Browne. The laboratory ceased operations in 1903 and its collections were reorganised in 1948. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

That brings us to the contemporary issue of retention or burial. The report of the Working Group on Human Remains in Museum Collections (WGHR), published in 2003,  set out public policy in relation to British Museums. The authors of the report acknowledged that human remains in collections “represent a unique and irreplaceable resource for the legitimate pursuance of scientific and other research” (p. 28)  but concluded that collections of human remains in museums should be subject to the sort of regulatory frameworks being developed for health authorities and hospitals in Britain (p. 81).

One of its principal finding was the need to remove legislative barriers to repatriation or burial by British museums, effectively making the ethical disposal of human remains in museum collections its default position (p. 20, para. 58). In 2004 the introduction of the Human Tissue Act allowed nine national museums to return human remains under 1,000 years old, where they consider it appropriate to do so. The British Museum rejected an application for repatriation in 2012  on grounds other than those provided for in the legislation, which illustrates the complexity of the issues involved and the need to consider claims for repatriation or burial on a case by case basis.

In terms of regulation in Ireland, the Human Tissue Bill has been stalled since 2013 and the Inspector of Anatomy, appointed by the Medical Council in the interim, has oversight of the ‘Old’ Anatomy collections in TCD. This leaves the burial of Magrath’s remains at the discretion of the college authorities; which means that any decision will have to deal with public perception as to the “morality” of retaining identifiable human remains in collections of scientific material. That is deeply problematic, and Duffy’s attempt to frame the issue in body snatching folklore is distorting what should be a valuable and timely debate.

References: 

British Museum,2012, Request for Repatriation of Human Remains to the Torres Strait Islands, Australia. Online document: http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/management/human_remains/repatriation_to_torres_strait.aspx

Cunningham, D. (1887). The Skeleton of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath. The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 29, 553-612. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30078824

Department of the Taoiseach, LEGISLATION PROGRAMME FOR AUTUMN SESSION 2013, Published:  18th September, 2013: http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/irish/Foilseacháin/Foilseacháin_2013/LEGISLATION_PROGRAMME_FOR_AUTUMN_SESSION_2013.html

Hooper, A. (1987). Dublin Anatomy in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Dublin Historical Record, 40(4), 122-132. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30100813

Human Tissue Act 2004, UK: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/30/contents

Report of The Working Group on Human Remains, November 2003,Dept. for Culture Media and Sport, Great Britain: http://www.museumsbund.de/fileadmin/geschaefts/dokumente/Leitfaeden_und_anderes/DCMS_Working_Group_Report_2003.pdf

Swanzy, H. (1893). Note on Defective Vision and Other Ocular Derangements in Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1889-1901), 3, 524-528. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20490478

Trinity College, Dublin, 2016, The Academic and Artistic Collections – a summary: First produced February 2010; contact and website updates March 2016: http://www.tcd.ie/artcollections/assets/pdf/TCD%20Academic%20and%20Artistic%20Collections%20summary.pdf