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 …

Photographs were taken: documenting the second famine in Connemara.

The origins of social documentary photography in Ireland: Part 2.

This photo was taken a couple of years ago. I was travelling between Rossaveel and Maam Cross, on my way to Leenane. The road travels through an upland wilderness of bogs and small lakes, a landscape that is typical of Southern Connemara. It reminded me of a shot taken by Marguierite Mespoulet in 1913, probably to the west on the coast road to the village of Carraroe.

Maison isolée, Sud du Connemara, Irlande, 31 mai 1913. Autochrome de Marguerite Mespoulet (inv.A 3 664).© Musée Albert-Kahn – Département des Hauts-de-Seine

Mespoulet had been commissioned by Albert Kahn to document ‘peasant’ life in the remote west of Ireland. She was using the newly developed autochrome process to shoot what are probably the first colour photographs taken in the west of Ireland. Mespoulet left Galway and headed for Connemara on 31 May, travelling along a well established tourist route. She never got there. She was stopped in her tracks by reports of an outbreak of typhoid that was sweeping the islands of southern Connemara. She took this shot of a thatched cottage. “A little to the north  of the place where this small house was taken” she wrote “the people are dying like flies from typhoid fever.”

Typhoid in Connemara was nothing new but in 1913 the cause of recurring outbreaks of fever was the subject of a row between the Irish Independent (nationalist) and the Irish Times (unionist) newspapers. An article published in the Irish Independent on May 26, 1913 accuses the Irish Times of publishing an editorial that was intended to minimise reports of a “plague” in Connemara. It included this quote from the editorial:

“[Typhoid] has made its appearance upon a few islands off Southern Connemara , miles removed from the tourist routes, in Gorumna, Lettermore , and Lettermullen, which have been described as ‘plague spots,’ the peasants are huddled in hovels that pass for houses, and they draw water from stagnant pools.”

The correspondent for the Irish Times claimed that poor housing and lack of clean water were to blame for renewed outbreaks of fever, but argued that talk of an “epidemic’ was not justified by the figures. In a dispensary area of almost 10,000 persons there were five fatal fever cases and 40 more cases notified. He (presumably) drew comparisons with other parts of Connemara  “where things are more favourable, or at least not quite so unpleasant,”  highlighting the fact that in the “plague centre” people shared their hovels with pigs “who were practically members of  the household.”  The peasants, it appears, were the agents of their own misfortune.

The Irish Independent took issue with this. A correspondent had stated in an earlier article (May 15)  that “If corroboration of the case [that there was a fever plague in Connemara] and the graphic photographs reproduced in our  columns were required, it would be found abundantly in the immediate response to, and commendation of our appeal by those who know the distress and the appalling  conditions of the stricken locality.” The Irish Independent criticised the callous bureaucracy of government and sanitary authorities, accusing them of placing the islanders in imminent danger of absolute extermination through shameful neglect.

The Irish Independent  also published an eyewitness account of conditions in Connemara. It was written by a special correspondent of the Connacht “Tribune.” He had motored with the local M.P. (Wm. O’Malley) to Carraroe, where he met the parish priest (Healy). They went on  Bealdangan and picked up the local doctor (O’Kelly). They then went to the “little hut” of John Lee where they met the Chief Secretary (Birrell), who was on a tour of inspection.

A halftone reproduction of John Lee’s “hut” was featured on The Irish Independent  Magazine Page on May 14, 1913. It was printed under the headline “Peasants Appalling Plight, Fever Stricken Connemara.”

Lee’s family was one of 800 hundred families trying to subsist on patches of potato scattered across  “the wilderness of rock and bog.” His 17 year old son had died in April and another child was in the fever hospital in Oughterard:

“The house stood about seven feet high, and was without an aperture of any kind, save the small door …We entered this 11 feet by 8 apartment that constituted the entire interior, and growing accustomed to the darkness, we recognised that it was practically devoid of furniture … It was, declared Mr. Birrell, the worst dwelling he had ever seen.

Where had he been? People like John Lee and his family had been dying in a famine that had started during the “crisis of 1879” and had continued more or less for over 30 years. On December 13, 1879 The Illustrated London News published the following illustration of the “Bog-Trotters of Ballintober:”

IRISH SKETCHES: BOG-TROTTER’S CABIN, BALLINTOBER BOG, ROSCOMMON. – SEE PAGE 558, Supplement to The Illustrated London News, Dec. 13, 1879, p. 557. Collection of Ciarán Walsh.

The accompanying article stated that:

The agricultural  disadvantages of Connaught are not to be denied, and we hear without surprise of the distressed condition of small farmers in that part of the island … Here [Ballintober] are still to be found some of the genuine “bog-trotters,” a class of peasants living in squalid poverty by the scanty produce of small plots of ground and wages by field labour, where no farmer has capital to give them employment. Our artist’s sketch of one of their wretched cabins, with the poor man and his children waiting for their dinner of potatoes to be boiled over a turf fire, outside the dwelling, by the comfortless care of the wife and mother, is a sorry picture of Irish rural life. There are probably a hundred thousand people in Ireland whose condition is not much better.

Some 20 years later the same conditions were documented in Connemara, and again in 1913. The tone of The Illustrated London News commentary is not all that different from the Irish Times editorial of 1913. Complacency  and official inaction was the order of the day. In an effort to shock people out of their complacency photographs were taken inside the “hovels” of the starving peasants in Gorumna in 1898. The intention was to prove that reports of a famine in Connemara were not exaggerated, that people were indeed starving to death in the west and southwest of Ireland. These photographs were published by the Mansion House Committee established by Lord Mayor Tallon. It was a remarkable event that signalled that social documentary photography had arrived in Ireland.

Next: In search of the “The Starving West.”

Information / References

Marguerite Mespoulet: http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/archives-de-la-planete/mappemonde/europe/irlande/

Ballintober / Cluain Bhríde in Roscommon is on the R367, a minor road heading northeast from the N60 Roscommon to Castlerea road, just before the village of Ballymoe. The river Suck meanders through extensive boglands on the Galway / Roscommon Border. The railway line runs through bogland in Cleaboy, just under two kilometres southwest of Ballintober, crossing the R367 at 53.7031629,-8.4184402

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The Horror And The Curiosity

Charles R. and John Browne, 1893, Group of women and Girls Inishbofin, from the Photograph albums of Charles R. Browne, TCD. With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN IRELAND: PART1

Alfred Cort Haddon visited North Connemara in July 1890 and it left  “a distinct impression of sterility, stones & starvation.” He neatly summarised the relentless famine that was endured by the cottier class right up to the end of the 19th century and, in some places, into the early 20th century. This was to become the object of  intense curiosity in the illustrated press: a morbid fascination that has its roots in groundbreaking reports published in the Illustrated News between 1847 and 1850. These reports would, in turn, provide the ‘horrific’ foundation for two of the main tropes of social documentary photography as it developed in the west of Ireland from the 1880s onwards: the wretched hovels of the Irish peasantry and  the “distressful” condition of women.

James O’Mahony, Mullins Hut, at Scull, published in THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS, Feb. 13, 1847. from the collection of Ciarán Walsh.

The Illustrated London News begins its coverage of the famine in West Cork in 1847 with the following declaration:

With the object of ascertaining the accuracy of the frightful statements received from the West, and of placing them in unexaggerated fidelity before our readers, a few days since, we commissioned our Artist, Mr. James Mahoney, of Cork, to visit a seat of extreme suffering, viz., Skibbereen and its vicinity; and we now submit to our readers the graphic results of his journey …

The report continues:

A specimen of the in-door horrors of Scull may be seen in the annexed sketch of the hut of a poor man named Mullins, who lay dying in a corner upon a heap of straw, supplied by the Relief Committee, whilst his three wretched children crouched over a few embers of turf, as if to raise the last remaining spark of life. This poor man, it appears, had buried his wife some five days previously, and was, in all probability, on the eve of joining her, when he was found out by the untiring efforts of the Vicar, who, for a few short days, saved him from that which no kindness could ultimately avert. Our Artist  assures us that the dimensions of the hut do not exceed ten feet square; adding that, to make the sketch, he was compelled to stand up to his ankles in the dirt and filth upon the floor.

In 1849 The Illustrated London News followed up on this report up with a series of seven illustrated articles on the operation of the newly introduced Poor Law in Ireland, concentrating on Kilrush but covering west and north Clare, Connemara and Clifden as well. The report published on 22 December contained an illustration that was to become – probably -the most iconic representation of famine in Ireland, a sketch of Bridget O’Donnell and her children.

40 years on the pattern repeats itself in the coverage of the “Second Famine” that followed the “crisis” of 1879 and reached a peak in 1898 in Connemara and in the South West of Ireland. There was a difference though, James O’Mahony’s pioneering illustrations were to be replaced by a series of graphic photographs. Was this the beginning of Social documentary photography in Ireland?

To be continued.

Photographs were taken: The origins of social documentary photography in Ireland: Part 2.

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To read the Illustrated London News articles online go to:

https://viewsofthefamine.wordpress.com/illustrated-london-news/sketches-in-the-west-of-ireland/

Synge and Sander, and the Significance of the Suit

 

I came across this photo on Tumblr recently and it reminded me of an old acquaintance that I had with John Berger – in print of course. I was an undergraduate student trying to come to terms with the ‘significance’ of the ‘suit’ in this photo.

Young Farmers was taken by August Sander in 1914 using a large format, glass plate camera with a long exposure time, a legacy of earlier formalised studio portraiture and all that that implied. It was the sixth plate in Sander’s portrait photobook Face of Our Time, published in 1929. It also appears in the first volume of Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century, a photographic index of the German population based on distinct social ‘types’.

John Berger ‘the Marxist art critic’ wrote an essay about the photo in which he stated: ‘The date is 1914. The three young men belong, at the very most, to the second generation who ever wore such suits in the European countryside. Twenty or 30 years earlier, such clothes did not exist at a price which peasants could afford.’ (Berger, The Suit and the Photograph, 1980, p.30.).

Berger suggests that the tree lads are deliberately playing with the viewers expectations of the peasant ‘type’ by adopting the stance and manner of urban ‘types’, the cigarette being especially significant in this regard (adapted from text on the Tate website).

 

 

Berger may have overstated it a little, in an Irish context anyhow. John Millington Synge took this photograph of Mairtín Mac Donnchadha in 1898, a mere 16 years before Young Farmers. Mac Donnchadha features prominently in ‘The Aran Islands’ (1907),  Synges account of life on the islands. In the book Mac Donnchadha is called  ‘Michael’ and is portrayed as a model of the primitive peasant ‘type’ found in Aran.

Justin Carville (Photography and Ireland), in a reprise of Berger’s earlier article, wrote in the(Irish Journal of Anthropology (reference below) about Synge’s account of taking the photograph.  Mairtín / Michael wanted to wear his suit, his Sunday clothes from Galway rather than the homespuns that he was photographed in. He wanted to distance himself from the ‘primitive life of the islands.’ This was evidence, according to Carville, that the islanders were ‘becoming increasingly aware of the production of their identity through the photographic image.’ In other words they understood the significance of the suit.

It seems they weren’t alone, judging by the studio portraits used by Synge (right) and Sander. At the time Synge was living in Paris on an annual allowance of £40 plus a new suit, courtesy of his landowning family. Synge, and others like, him were known to the islanders as ‘lucht na cultacha deasa,’  the people with the nice suits.

 

 

 

 

Ref: “My Wallet of Photographs”: Photography, Ethnography and Visual Culture in J.M. Synge’s Aran Islands” Irish Journal of Anthropology Vol. 10 no. 1. (2007): 5-11.