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 …

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

In search of the ‘Starving West’: TV series on social documentary photography

A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway during the Famine . Source: Virginia University.

About 10 years go I came across this photograph. The caption suggests that it was taken during the Famine of 1845-9 in Ireland.  It wasn’t. True, it is very similar to the scenes recorded in cabins throughout the west of Ireland and graphic illustrations of such scenes were published in illustrated newspapers at the time. There is no record, however, of any photograph of people dying of starvation in the 1845-9 famine.  Indeed a photograph like this would have been impossible in the early stages of photography – invented less than a decade before the famine. As a result he photograph has been dismissed by some people as a fake, the harsh pool of light suggesting a studio staging.

I set out to look for the original and test its authenticity. I never found it, but I found the next best thing -the original document in which the photograph was first published.  The photograph is entitled ‘A Sick Family Carraroe’ and is one of 18 photographs that were published in a pamphlet entitled  ‘Relief of Distress in the West and South of Ireland, 1898.’ The photographs were taken in April during an inspection of conditions in Connemara by Thomas L. Esmonde, Inspector of the Manchester Committee. He was reacting to reports of famine in Conamara. He inspected a dozen houses in which he found people lying on the floor, covered with rags and old sacks and barely able to move from a combination of influenza and hunger.

The search for the photograph became the basis of an idea for a TV series on social documentary photography or, to put it another way, a social history of documentary photography in Ireland in the 19th century. I pitched the idea to a producer and a broadcaster in 2011 and funding was eventually secured from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland in 2014 for a six part series based on my research. TG4 will begin  broadcasting Trid an Lionsa or ‘Through the Lens’ tomorrow Sunday 25 October 2015.

I haven’t been involved in in the production itself, just the research into historical social documentary photography and the people who work in this area. This material has been “translated into television” by Cathal Watters (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire) and follows the TG4 controversial format of presenter driven, on-the-road info-tainment. (http://wp.me/p56Bmf-5g).

I have no idea what to expect. Like a colleague I will be watching from behind the couch … hoping!  It’ll be interesting to see how the balance between a social history of documentary photography and ‘factual’ entertainment works out. I know some key “voices” were excluded but that is the unenviable task of a producer. Either way it promises be an intriguing televisual event and, at the very least, it should create an awareness of the rich resource that exists in photographic archives and collections around the country.

Related posts:

Jane W. Shackleton, Pioneering Photographer and Unsung Hero of the Gaelic Revival

Alfred Cort Haddon: Haddon and the Aran Islands

Famine Photography: Photographs were taken: documenting the second famine in Connemara

The Aran Islands … the most remarkable islands I have come across anywhere. Alfred Cort Haddon 24th July 1890.

Michael Faherty, The Aran Islands. With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

“The Aran Islands are in many respects the most remarkable islands I have as yet come across anywhere.”

Alfred Cort Haddon, 24th July 1890.

The word “many” is a guess. In the original manuscript there is a blot, where the ink spilled out of Haddon’s pen (who remembers fountain pen and ink blots?). He appears to have been ina rush to record his first impressions of the Aran Islands.  Haddon landed in Inishmore – the “big” island – for the first time at 8.30 in the morning on Thursday 24 July, 125 years ago today.

The lead up to Aran had been less than inspiring.  Haddon departed  the “truculent” inhabitants of Inishbofin 6 days before and travelled to North Connemara, which had “a distinct impression of sterility, stones & starvation.“ He arrived in Galway on Monday 21st July and had a thorough look around. He was less than impressed, naming the “city” after Ichabod, a biblical reference alluding to the fact that all glory – except for the salmon – had departed from the “Citie of Tribes.”

Galway as photographed by American folklorist and travel writer Clifton Johnson, reproduced from ‘The Isle of the Shamrock’ published in 1901.

After 2 days in Galway he arrived in Aran. The impact is clear from a dramatic change in his journal from that point on, ten pages (41 – 51)  that cover a week spent in the islands. The writing is smaller and obviously rushed, the pen constantly runs out of ink, punctuation is often abandoned and there are quick changes in emphasis as he struggles to describe the remarkable place that is the Aran Islands. On page 50 he concludes:

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.

Four of the ten pages are taken up with sketches of antiquities and on page 49 there is a wonderful series of small, cartoon-like sketches of men carrying a currach, a set of oars and, two sketches of currachs under sail – Haddon was on the island when the annual rasáí na gcurrach or currach races were taking place.  Haddon had a strong interest in art and had some formal training in drawing and illustration. Alison Hingston Quiggin, his devoted assistant and biographer, draws attention to “his work as an artist, and his lectures and writings about Art.” She remarks that “Sketching came as easily as note taking.” (Haddon The Head  Hunter page132). However as the ‘Fingal’ journal progresses one can see Haddon’s increased interest in photographically recording the people he encountered. On July 22nd he visited the Claddagh fishing village in Galway and noted in his journal that:

I have seen many groups which could make lovely photographs if they could be taken instantaneously & unknown to the subjects. The old women here affect a close fitting white muslin cap.

The “instantaneously & unknown” bit was to prove important a few days later, when Haddon attempted to take photographs of people on the Aran islands:

In the village of Killeany – close by where Mrs. Green’s house is – I endeavoured to make friends with the people by employing my old tactics of noticing the children – but I had not much time to follow it up. I hoped to take photographs of them later on. The day before we left we took our cameras but with the exception of a few men & lads none would stay to be photographed. When we turned a camera on a group the components scattered as if we were firing upon them, girls & woman fled to their houses whipped up the  children & barred their doors. As we could not understand Irish we had to guess the nature of their remarks. At last matters got to such a pitch the we both rapidly retreated in different directions.

This anecdote is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it does not feature in Quiggin’s biography, which relies heavily on similar anecdotes from the ‘Fingal’ journal in order to establish the character of Haddon and describe the time he spent  in the west of Ireland. Haddon’s account of stealing skulls from Inisbofin features as does an account of the wife of the Lord Lieutenant – the Queen’s representative and effective ruler of Ireland – drinking poteen (illegally distilled alcohol) in Connemara.

This suggests that Quiggin did not have access to this part of Haddon’s  journal when she was writing his biography in 1942. I think that these pages became separated from the original manuscript sometime in 1892, when Haddon was preparing a paper on the craniology of the Aran Islands. This was read into the proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy on 12 December 1892. They were rediscovered in 2013 by Aidan Baker, the Haddon Librarian in Cambridge University, when he presented the Irish ‘Headhunter’ exhibition in the Haddon Library. The exhibition comprised photographs from the albums of Charles R. Browne. Browne worked with Haddon on the Irish Ethnographic Survey. He assembled the photographic archive of the survey in a series of six albums in or around the year 1897.

One section of the Ethnographic Survey of Ireland’s representation of The Aran Islands. 2 pages from the photograph albums of Charles R. Browne. With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

On the occasion of the opening Aidan and I thought it would be a nice gesture to read from Haddon’s copy of the seminal Ethnography of the Aran Islands published by Haddon and Browne in 1893. There wasn’t a copy in the library but a search of “the locked room” turned up an envelope containing Haddon’s own copy of Studies in Irish Craniology: The Aran Islands by Professor A. C. Haddon.

Aidan Baker, Haddon Librarian, Margaret Risbeth, granddaughter of Alfred Cort Haddon, and Ciarán Walsh, http://www.curator.ie, at the opening of the Irish ‘Headhunter’ in Cambridge in 2013.

The envelope contained the missing pages from Haddon’s journal along with all sorts of other fascinating material – a transcript of folklore  about the “evil eye” and, what appears to be a first draft of notes to accompany a slide show based on the photographs taken by Dixon. In the latter document Haddon remarks that:

The islands are not so much frequented by tourists as they deserve to be. To a naturalist they are most interesting … The people too are a fine handsome race, upright men of good physique, ruddy complexion, fair hair and blue gray eyes, there is a large proportion of nice looking and often 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 of a beautiful russet – red colour. In  the west of Ireland the men wear boots & the women go bare footed, here both sexes wear native made sandals , ‘pompooties’, which they make for themselves out of cow-skins. In almost any cottage wool carding and spinning may he seen in operation, the spinning wheel being turned by the hand. The ancient British coracle also here survives as the canvas covered canoe or “curragh.”

With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Our illustrations, which are from photographs taken by Mr. A. F. Dixon of Dublin, illustrate (1) a class from national school held in the open air, (2) a group of two men and a boy on the top of  the ancient stone fort at Inishmaan [Inis Meáin] the men are wearing pompooties and the boy the characteristic petticoat which the small boys wear as well as girls.

The illustrations continue with a series of antiquities, the whole show roughly corresponding to the sequence of photographs collected by Browne in the album dealing with the Aran Islands. It is an extraordinary document. It is no exaggeration, I believe, to claim that this is the moment that Haddon first conceived of “scientific” or modern visual ethnography which was central to his conception of fieldwork as defined during the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898 – where the young photographer Anthony Wilkin slotted into Dixon’s role.

It becomes clear that writing and sketching were not up to the task of conveying the impression that the Aran Islands and their inhabitants made on Haddon. He wrote in his journal (p. 42) that “When I return to Dublin I hope to have some photographs to show you which will illustrate the physical features better than I can describe them.” Haddon quickly converted Dixon’s photographs into lantern slides and the illustrated lectures that followed made the Aran Islands visible as never before. Haddon’s reach extended far beyond  his network of contacts in the RDS, the Royal society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy however.  He was strapped for cash and undertook a lot of public speaking engagements. Most of these were illustrated with lantern slides, meeting the demand for magic lantern shows and satisfying public curiosity about life in the ‘primitive districts’ of the west of Ireland.

All of this activity  was taking place at a key point in the consolidation of the Gaelic revival as a movement. It is possible that Haddon’s magic lantern shows represent a visual turn in what had been a largely language based cultural movement. Most people think of Synge in this respect but Synge’s photography dates from 1898, 8 years after Haddon visited Aran for the first time. At that time Synge would have been reading for his “Little Go” or final freshman examinations in TCD – “poor Johnnie  got a third” his mother lamented. Synge can be ruled out at this stage. The key figure in this context – the increasing ‘visibility’ of the west of Ireland as a component of a visual turn in cultural nationalism – is a remarkable woman and photographer called Jane W. Shackleton. Her career as a photographer had been completely overlooked in the history of photography in Ireland until Christiaan Corlett published a collection of her photographs in 2012.

Jane W. Shackleton followed Haddon to Aran in 1891 and, in total, visited the islands on 12 occasions, four of those as part of field trips organised by the Royal Society of Antiquaries. She visited Inishmore/ Inis Mór for the last time in 1906. Shackleton had developed an interest in photography in the 1880s as the industrialisation of the medium brought it within the reach of middle class ‘amateurs.’ Between 1885 and 1906 – mainly – she amassed one of the largest collections of early photographs by a female photographer in Ireland (the collection is intact and curated by the Shackleton family).  Regardless of gender, Shackleton was one of the most prolific photographers at a crucial point in the imagination and representation of the Irish nation.

The people of the west of Ireland – the Aran Islands in particular – featured prominently in Shackleton’s photographs and the many illustrated lectures that she gave as a member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. Apart from having a strong social documentary feel to it, Shackleton’s photography had to have had an influence on the Gaelic revival and must have contributed to the visual turn stimulated by Haddon in 1890. This is speculative at this stage but my research into this has only just begun.

‘Mode of carrying curragh’ from the photograph albums of Charles R. Browne. With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

One photograph is of particular interest. It shows two men carrying a currach, an image that functions as an instantly recognisable trope of the islands. Corlett reproduces it on page 149 as Curragh being Carried by Aran Men Inis Mór, County Galway C. 1899. The same image is to be found among the first generation of prints and lantern slides in the Haddon collection and, the photograph albums of Charles R. Browne (see above). The provenance of the photograph has to be determined – how it came to be in the Haddon collection. Haddon was an avid collector and built his collection from a wide range of sources. That points to the mobility of photographic  images at this time, demonstrating that photographs and lantern slides were highly mobile meaning making technologies – to paraphrase Donna Haraway.

Jane W. Shackleton  died in 1909, the same year as John Millington Synge. Synge had taken about 50 photographs in the west of Ireland but these quickly became detached from his narrative of life in the Aran Islands – they were replaced by illustrations by Jack B. Yeats. Around 30 of those photographs were collected and published by Lilo Stevens in 1971 but the full impact of Synge’s photography was not realised until I exhibited them in association with the Library in TCD in 2009, marking  the centenary of his death.

The big question is why Shackleton’s career as a photographer and, in particular, her role in making the west of Ireland visible has been so overshadowed by Synge – whose own photography was neglected so thoroughly for almost a century. Add Dixon’s photography to the equation and the exception begins to look like a pattern. The Ethnography of the Aran Islands and the other surveys carried out by the Irish Ethnographic Survey have been regarded for too long as a narrow, racially inflected colonial enterprise. Dublin was, and is, a small place and the extent to which Haddon, Dixon, Shackleton and Synge were all part of the same class that engaged with the idea of Irishness  at the end of the 19th century is all too often overlooked.

And that, as they say is another story.

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Sources and Credits

Corlett, Chris, 2012, Jane W. Shackleton’s Ireland, Cork: Collins Press.

De Mórdha, Dáithí and Ciarán Walsh, 2012, The Irish Headhunter, The Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne. Dublin: Stationery Office & http://www.curator.ie.

Green, David H and Edward M. Stephens, 1959, J. M. Synge 1871-1909, New York: MacMillan.

Haraway, Donna, 1988,  Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No.3. (Autumn, 1988)

Herle, Anita and Sandra  Rouse (eds.), 2009, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnston, Clifton, 1901, The Isle of the Shamrock, New York, London: The MacMillan Company.

Quiggins, A. Hingston, 1942/2010, Haddon the Head Hunter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stephens, Lilo, 1971, My Wallet of Photographs, Dublin: Dolmen Editions.

Walsh, C., 2013, Charles R. Browne, The Irish Headhunter, Irish Journal of Anthropology Vol 16. Anthropological Association of Ireland.

Walsh, C., 2012, John Millington Synge, Grianghrafadóir in: De Mórdha, M. (Ed.). Ceiliúradh an Bhlascaoid 14. Dublin: Coiscéim.

What happened on Inishbofin in July 1890? Three days that changed the history of Anthropology in Ireland and Britain.

Teampall Cholmain by Marie Coyne, The Inishbofin Heritage Museum

St. Colman’s Abbey is a small ruin on a remote island off the West coast of Ireland. It is situated on the site of a seventh century monastery established by Colman of Lisdisfarne around 668AD. Archaeologically speaking this is a modest site  but it is the  setting for a remarkable sequence of events that were to have profound consequences for the development of anthropology in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday 16 July  1890 – 125 years ago to the day – the steamer  Fingal anchored in Inishbofin. The Fingal had been chartered by the Royal Dublin Society (RDS)  for survey work on the fisheries of the western seaboard. One of the scientists on board was Alfred Cort Haddon, a marine zoologist who had developed an interest in ethnology—the comparative study of races—whilst on a similar survey the year before in the Torres Strait,located between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Haddon had  joined the remarkable and Reverend William Spottiswood Green, Inspector of Fisheries, in Killybegs in County Donegal  on 26 June and headed south three days later. Haddon  assumed responsibility for keeping a “narrative ” journal of the survey. Green’s narrative has been publish by the RDS  but Haddon’s account has never been published in full and the manuscript is held in Cambridge University.

This is Haddon’s  account of  what happened on Inishbofin in July 1890:

Page 29

Wednesday – July 16 . Dixon and I got up at 6 o’clock & photographed Cromwell’s Fort and had a bathe. The 2  Mrs Allies (who reside on the island) & Father McHugh came to breakfast at 8 o’clock & after breakfast we tried a new fishing ground for longline fishing. We had just over 400 hooks out on a line measuring about —- feet – the result was poor for we only got 1 Halibut / 5 foot long and weighing 95lbs.) 1 Turbot, 1 Cod, 13 Ling, 17 Conger, 2 Torsk, 1 Cuckoo-Gurnard, 6 Pickard dog fish, 1 Tope, 7 Nurse-Hounds (Dogfish), 1 Skate, 1 Ray. – Then Dixon and I had to measure, weigh & examine a selection of them. I will explain our particular work on another occasion.

The 2 Mr Allies are Englishmen – some time ago, 8 or 9 years I believe, their father foreclosed on a mortgage on this island & so it & several others some 7 in all – including rocks – became his property & he sent a son to look after it & he has lived here ever since. For about the last 18 mths. another brother joined this one & so these 2 middle aged men are living bachelor’s lives on this out of the way island – fishing, farming, & so forth. They have both spent several years in Australia, mainly in Queensland, sheep farming etc.

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The latter brother is more or less () an engineer. The former is the recognised landlord. I got more intimate with Edward, the engineer, & I hope I have interested him in Folklore & he has promised to collect information for the Royl. Irish Academy. He told me of an old ruined church where there were some skulls & we arranged with Dixon a plan of action. We all went ashore together that night & he provided us with a sack & later in the dark, took us close to the church. The coast being clear Dixon & I climbed over the gate & went down the enclosure which is practically a large graveyard, on our way we disturbed several cattle. We stumbled along & entered the church tumbling over the stones which are placed over the graves, in the corner we saw in the dim light the skulls in a recess in the wall. There must have been 40 or more, all broken, most useless but on (overhanding) them we found a dozen which were worth carrying away & only one however had the face bones. Whilst we were thus engaged we heard 2 men slowly walking & talking in the road & like Brer Fox – we ‘lay low’ & like the Tar Baby “kept on saying nothing.” When the coast was clear we put our  spoils in the sack & cautiously made our way back to the road, then it did not matter who saw us. We returned to the Allies’ house. Dixon kept the bag & then Poole went off to the gig with us. The 2 sailors  wanted to take the bag for Dixon but he wouldn’t let them & when asked what was in it replied “poteen.” So without any further trouble we got our skulls aboard & there we packed them in Dixon’s portmanteau & locked it, no one on the steamer, except our two selves, having any idea that there were 12 human skulls in the steamer & they shan’t know either.

Teampall Chomain by Dixon. The niche where the skulls were kept is visible in the lower right hand corner. The sketc h referred to by Haddon below is an exact illustration of this scene, suggesting that the sketch and the photograph are contemporaneous. This copy of the photograph is from the photograph albums of Charles R. Browne. With permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

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Next afternoon we landed  & went to have a look at the place by daylight & then I made this sketch [a drawing illustrating the site of the niche and the skulls]. The whole place is a mass of graves covered with loose stones. There are no inscriptions & there is no carving anywhere. This particular building was the chapel of a monastery which was founded by St. Coleman in about 667. It is referred to by the “Venerable Bide”; but soon passed into oblivion. On the succeeding page I give a sketch of the church from a neighbouring hill, showing Inishlyon in the middle distance and the mountains of Connemara in the far distance, the group of mountains to the right is “The Twelve Pins.”  In the right hand neat corner of the churchyard is St. Colman’s will of which the accompanying is a sketch, the well itself is inside.

Teampall Cholmain, Inishbofin by Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum.

Haddon left Inishbofin on Friday 18 July 1890.

In November 1893 he presented a more formal report on Studies in Irish Craniology II, Inishbofin, Co. Galway to the Royal Irish Academy.

Cyanotype of the Anthropometry Laboratory and Comparative Anatomy Museum in TCD in 1891. With the permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Haddon had earned the nickname “Haddon the Headhunter” as a boy because of a prank he played on his sisters. The visit to Inishbofin set in train a series of events that converted a boyish fascination with skulls into a scientific orthodoxy that was the signature of an influential player in the establishment of anthropology as a scientific discipline in Britain.

Haddon’s involvement in the Fingal fishing survey coincided with a developing interest in anthropology as a result of his experiences in the Torres Strait. He was particularly interested in folklore as a form of history used by primitive peoples. He regarded the link between folklore and anthropology as similar to the link between palaeontology and archaeology. He had heard of a tradition of proxy weddings on Inishbofin and was eager to learn more. This seemed to matter more than ‘Headhunting’ in July 1890. He had collected skulls in Torres Straits but referred to them as “curios.” Following his escapade with Dixon however he developed a more “scientific” interest in skulls or “crania.”

Dixon had been working in comparative anatomy under Professor Daniel J. Cunningham of TCD. At the time Cunningham was mapping the topography of the human brain and comparing this to the brains of anthropoid apes. Dixon was also a keen photographer. This meeting of interests was to have a major influence on Haddon’s future direction as a scientist. He became obsessed with craniology – the categorisation of skull types through the measurement of particular features  – and developed a theory of racial migration based on tracking the distribution of different skull types.

On his return to Dublin Haddon and Cunningham established an Anthropometry Laboratory in TCD and in 1891 they launched the Ethnographic Survey of Ireland. This was an attempt to use laboratory methods “in the field” in an attempt to trace the origins of the Irish race; this was the origin of the term “fieldwork” which, in this case, consisted of  measuring and photographing the physical characteristics of people in the remotest districts in Ireland, starting in the Aran islands in 1892.

Charles R. Browne “in the field” in Inishbofin in 1893. From the photograph albums of Charles R. Browne. With Permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

The following year his colleague Charles R. Browne returned to St. Colman’s Abbey but the islanders prevented him form stealing more skulls. Browne, a medical doctor, was more interested in social conditions in the West and, with Cunningham, began to emphasise sociology over physical anthropology and, ethnography over measurement: a split that anticipated a major philosophical divide in the natural and social sciences in the 20th century.

That is a story that has yet to be told.

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Credits / Further Information:

Photography by Marie Coyne, The Inishbofin Heritage Museum.

This blog is based on a presentation made by Ciarán Walsh at the Anthropology and Photography Conference organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in the British Museum in May 2014, in association with Dr Jocelyne Dudding (Cambridge) and Dr Mark Maguire (Maynooth). This research continues as a postgraduate research project with the Anthropology Department of Maynooth University in association with the Irish Research Council. Ciarán Walsh was elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2015.

The photographic archive of the  Irish Ethnographic Survey was published by Ciarán Walsh and Dáithí de Mórdha in 2012 in association with TCD, the OPW and the Heritage Council of Ireland. See De Mórdha, Dáithí and Ciarán Walsh, 2012, The Irish Headhunter, The Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne. Dublin: Stationery Office & http://www.curator.ie.

This material was updated in 2013 in an article by Ciarán Walsh for the Irish Journal of Anthropology:  Walsh, C., 2013, Charles R. Browne, The Irish Headhunter, Irish Journal of Anthropology Vol 16. Anthropological Association of Ireland.