Irish reactions to the Velvet Revolution in 1989

Here in the Czech Republic, it is no ordinary Tuesday. Today in the Czech calendar is Freedom and Democracy Day. November 17th 1989 marks a significant day in the modern history of the Czech Republic. November 17th 1989 occupies a position in the narrative of Czech history,  like October 28th 1918, of the beginning of a hopeful new era. It marks the emergence from the oppression of regime foisted on Czechs from outside. In 1918, it was casting off the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire to form the First Czechoslovak Republic. In 1989, it was casting off a calcified Communist regime which had since the beginning of the 1970s enforced ‘normalization’ following the crushing of the Prague Spring. These are the parallels between 1918 and 1989, and as with any narratives of national freedom, they are highly seductive. But, the truth of the events of 1989, the ‘velvet revolution’, and the end of Communist rule beginning with the student protests on November 17th that year are decidedly more complicated.

Book Launch alert: Soccer in Munster, 1877-1937

I know I’ve been quiet on this blog for some time, but that’s due to the imminent release of my first monograph, and a move of country. Next month, I’ll be celebrating the publication and launch of my monograph, Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877-1937, published by Cork University Press.

This book is based in part on the work completed for my PhD thesis but also includes material and research first presented in rough form on this blog, which has been an integral part of the formulation of myself as a writer and historian over the past number of years.

So, if you find yourself in Cork this June, I’d love if you could join me at my launch, details of which are below.

And, if you’d like a sample of some of what’s coming in the book, you could do worse than visit Irish Garrison Towns blog, pick up the most recent issue of Lookleft (available in Eason’s and other good newsagents), on The42.ie or buy Issue 2 of Póg Mo Goal.

Jarveys, Jarveys, Gerry Mac Arowner: Hackney Carriages in late nineteenth century Cork

From The South of Ireland illustrated: with descriptive letterpress and maps, Cork: Guy & Co., 1904. Source: http://www.corkpastandpresent.ie

When we think of way transport shaped the modern city, we usually think of light rail like trams, of undergrounds or else the railways. We almost never seem to think though of the hackney carriage. In addition to the role of these forms of transport, the hackney carriage similarly had a role to play in cementing the increasing ability of Cork’s middle classes to loosen the previously necessary proximity between home and work. Indeed as Angela Fahy notes:

Members of the predominantly Catholic middle classes lived in the suburbs in substantial terraced and detached houses; set in neat gardens, behind walls, safe they hoped from poverty, crime and ill-health associated with much of the city’s population.[1]

The Tramping Worker: questions on transience and organisation in America, 1880-1920

I have done a good deal of running around in America seeking the best place, but all my sorrow I have lost by it. The American country is gone.

– Letter from Patrick Kearney to John Kearney, 21 December 1890[1]

Migration is often perceived as a two-stage journey: departure and arrival. The letter quoted above from Patrick Kearney to his brother reveals that often a migrant’s journey did not end at the first port of call. His pitiable disappointment at having little to show for all his years of “running around” challenges the myth of the American dream. As one historian notes “the emigration movement…is heroic to look back on… but for the individual emigrant it was often a personal tragedy.”[2] Historians have challenged the assumption of destined success, but many continue to focus on either the negative or positive experiences of migration, neglecting the breadth of possible outcomes and opinions for a more limited binary either/or explanation. Different feelings on this movement can be found within the same ethnic group and social class. Irish-born Seamus Ó Muircheartaigh and Kate Flanagan both moved to several countries and states across America in search of work but their views display a certain dissonance. In “Mo chiach mar a thána” (“Alas that I ever came”) Ó Muircheartaigh wrote  “Sin mar a chaitheas-sa tamall dem shaol,/Ó bhaile go baile gan toinnte ar mo thaobh” (That’s how I spent part of my life,/Going from place to place, with no company at my side).[3] Some held a much more positive opinion, like Kate Flanagan who wrote to Mike, her brother-in-law in Ireland, telling him that “I can’t help but think it would be better for all the family in Ireland to come to this country,” humorously adding “if it was only to get away to a more agreeable climate.”[4]  Remembering that we can move beyond a dichotomy of good or bad, or immigration as from origin to destination, would allow for more novel attempts to explore the varied experiences among different ethnic groups, and more importantly, to highlight and explain the importance of transience among immigrants in the Unites States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. How frequently did people move from one place to another? What were the impediments or facilitators of this movement? Was transience purely an economic decision? How were communities affected by the changes over time and place? What were the networks that sustained them and how were these networks in turn sustained?

Of course you can question, why should we focus on immigrants and mobility when looking at American workers? The first response to that question is that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed a huge movement of people to the American continent enabling the industrialisation of the United States. We should keep in mind a notable recent work documenting this process, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America by Aristide R. Zolberg, which reveals that the popular image of uncontrollable waves of people entering the US is a false one and that the American government was capable, when willing, to limit this movement.[5] Another answer to this question lies in the large numbers of people. While only 13 percent of the population of the United States are classed as foreign-born in 1880, 42 percent of those engaged in manufacturing or extraction industries were immigrants.[6] This number grows into an overwhelming majority if we include the children of foreign-born and African Americans. The importance of immigrants in the development of American industry is hard to overstate.

Simultaneously there are problems with categories, as people are often grouped into broad headings based on religion, nationality or ethnic group that might not be particularly useful. If we scratch the surface of these broad communities and we find further important differences; northern and southern Italians, Corkonians and Fardowners, Cornish and English to name a few. Nationally based fraternities (e.g. the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the case of the Irish) tried to foster ethnic cooperation and promote a hyphenated identity reconciling their Old World origins with their lives in the New World, a somewhat paradoxical effort, and again we should try to bear in mind to local complexities when detailing particular groups. Likewise leaders in trade unions also engaged in contradictory efforts to remain loyal to both their own ethnic group while promoting unity with workers from other backgrounds. Immigrants also exhibited similar diversity in their patterns of movement. ‘New immigrants’ from eastern and southern Europe bucked earlier immigration trends, with larger numbers returning ‘home’. Historians estimate that fifty percent of Italians returned home between 1908 and 1923, compared to single-digit repatriation rates for Russian Jews and the Irish.[7] Contemporaries noted this difference at the time with usage of the label ‘sojourners’ rather than ‘immigrants’, but few historians have addressed the question of how this affected their views of movement and migration.[8] A continuing reexamination of immigrants bearing these problems in mind might reveal that immigrants had a more nuanced sense of self and association than historians have previously ascribed to them.

Sixty-three years ago the historian Eric Hobsbawm opened his article “The Tramping Artisan” with the statement “the story of nineteenth-century labor is one of movement and migration.”[9] While his article represents an attempt to explain the personal and social impact of frequent dislocation on skilled journeymen in Britain, the premise applies equally to immigrant workers in America. The development of transnational history has seen a reevaluation of borders as the defining parameters of historical phenomena and the scholarship related to them. Some of the exciting new work on Irish America includes Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the American West 1860-1910, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race and The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867-1900, and they each forcefully challenge traditional historical assumptions on the Irish in the West, Irish identity and organizations.[10]  Transnationalism in turn has led to the reexamination of people’s movement, formerly through the prism of migration, through the more broad term of mobility.[11]

Many questions are waiting to be answered by future projects. Some questions that can be raised about American studies follow, but many other similar questions could be asked of other sub-fields of nineteenth and twentieth century history. What effect did the staggered migration have on working-class ethnic communities? Did it impede or encourage ethnic, fraternal or union organization? How did the immigrant experience in eastern cities differ from the American West? Were there significant similarities or differences in both the experience and perception of mobility between ethnicities, occupations or classes? Some of these questions have been partly answered in relation to specific groups, for example Liping Zhu and Sue Fawn Chung’s pioneering work on the Chinese communities in the American West.[12]

Simultaneous with the advent of these new approaches has been the comparable decline of the study of labor and trade union history and in response historians should try to reengage with the history of workers, offering fresh perspective and utilizing the new historiographical approaches that have emerged in the intervening decades. Craig Calhoun recently presented an important challenge to labor history in The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements, arguing that not all social movements were inherently progressive and that these groups expressed a much broader spectrum of goals and beliefs, often more conservative, than historians have credited to them. It can be hoped that further research will uncover more stories of people’s lives, with their accompanying perceptions and convictions and help us determine whether these are valid assertions. For my part I fully intend to keep digging for answers.

 

 

[1] Séamus De Búrca (ed.), The Soldier’s Song: The Story of Peadar Ó Cearnaigh (Dublin: P.J. Bourke, 1957), p. 251.

[2] Terry Coleman, Passage to America: A history of emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland to America in the mid-nineteenth century (1972: London: Hutchinson & County), p. 248.

[3] Seán Ó Dubhda, Duanaire duibhneach : i bailiú d’amhránaibh agus de phíosaibh eile filidheachta a ceapadh le tuairim céad bliain i gCorca Dhuibhne, agus atá fór i gcuimhne agus i mbéaloideas na ndaoine ann (Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig Díolta Foillseacháin Rialtais, 1976),132-133. English translation by Dr Bruce D. Boling, Brown University, from Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. xiii.

[4] Kate Flanagan to Mike in Ireland was more positive Napa, California to her brother-in-love, Mike 31 March, 1899. Flanagan Family Letters. Private collection generously shared with me by Professor Kerby A. Miller, University of Missouri, Columbia.

[5] Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[6] U.S. Tenth Census, 1880, Report on the Manufactures of the United States (Washington, D.C, 1882), pp. 17, 36.

[7] Mark Wyman, Round-trip America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 9-12.

[8] Two important exceptions are the collection of essays in Dirk Hoerder (ed.) Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies. The European and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985) and Donna R Gabaccia, Italy’s many diasporas (Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2000).

[9] E. J. Hobsbawn, “The Tramping Artisan,” The Economic History Review, New Series 3 (1951): pp. 299-320.

[10] David M. Emmons, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West 1845-1910 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[11] Transnationalism does not ignore nationalism or the nation-state rather it prompts historians to simultaneous consider “differing geographic scales – the local, the national, and the transnational.” Ian Tyrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991):  p. 1033.

[12]  Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997); Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchant in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

No One Can Insult Our Flag: Investigating an Incident in the War of Independence in Waterford

Having recently researched some of the history around First World War commemoration in Waterford in the interwar period, I was struck by one incident in particular: the events which took place on Armistice Day in 1920 in Dungarvan at the height of the war of independence. Dungarvan, in the west of County Waterford, was in that part of Waterford that saw the greatest amount of agitation from the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Unlike in East Waterford, which included the city, Dungarvan and the surrounding area was by comparison a hot bed of raids on RIC barracks and skirmishes with the RIC. Intrigued by the incident which took place in the town of Dungarvan on 11 November 1920, I wanted to investigate further.

The Irish Front – Republican Congress in London

 

The Irish diaspora has a long history of involvement in radical politics in Britain. Their contribution to the labour movement in the form of the Chartists, producing leading lights such as Feargus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien; the matchmakers strike in 1888 in East London; the London dockers strike of 1889; the influence of James Connolly and Jim Larkin; and the first Labour Minister for Health in the minority government of 1924 being the Irish-born John Wheatley; is well-established. The Irish have also formed their own branches of home-grown organisations in Britain, such as the IRB, the Gaelic League, and the IRA. I have recently started a postdoc at the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class at NUI Galway which examines the impact Irish independence had on the British working-class in the period 1922-1945. Part of this explores the life and politics of the Irish working-class diaspora in Britain at the time. In the Ireland of this time, arguably one of the most important, and certainly one of the most debated radical organisations to be formed (and fall-apart) was Republican Congress.

Congress was formed as a left-wing split from the IRA in 1934. For a number of years, the left within the IRA, led by Peadar O’Donnell, Frank Ryan, and George Gilmore amongst others, had attempted to reform the organisation in a leftward direction, convinced that the gun alone would not achieve the Republic. The IRA, they believed, needed to take-up social issues, engaged alongside the workers and small farmers in their day-to-day struggles to convince them of the relevance of the fight for the Republic that would bring an improvement to their lives. The IRA had made overtures in this direction with the formation of the socialist-republican Saor Éire in 1931, but the ensuing ‘red scare’ put paid to that venture. After a number of subsequent failed attempts of reform by the left, which culminated in a vote at the 1934 Army Convention, O’Donnell and the others walked out. A conference held in Athlone, County Westmeath on the weekend of 7-8 April issued a manifesto proclaiming the creation of Republican Congress with the call ‘We believe that a Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots Capitalism on its way.’[1] The momentum behind Republican Congress grew throughout the summer of 1934. Strong branches were created in Achill, Leitrim, Kilkenny, Dublin and Waterford.[2] Congress engaged in many social campaigns to improve the lives of working-class people in Ireland, such as through the creation of the Tenants Leagues to fight for improvements in housing for the slum-dwellers of Dublin. Congress held its inaugural conference at Rathmines town hall from 29-30 September 1934, where, as is well known, it split. First-hand accounts are available from George Gilmore and Patrick Byrne here and here. Despite this, Congress continued to campaign until the end of the decade, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 giving it a new lease of life.

Congress did not just organise in Ireland however, but also had a branch among the Irish diaspora in London. This included many talented individuals who would later go to fight and die in Spain such as Charlie Donnelly, Michael Kelly, and Tommy Patten. The Republican Congress in London even produced its own newspaper, Irish Front. I have been able to locate one copy of this dated 11 May 1935, Issue 5 of Vol 1, which is reproduced here. My apologies for the poor quality, it is a copy of a copy of a copy. From the issue I have found, Irish Front, although poorly-produced, provided a well-informed left analysis of Irish and British issues for the Irish diaspora. Its notices also give a tantalizing glimpse into the political activities of the Irish diaspora in Britain. The London branch of Congress would later fuse with other small organisations in 1938 to create the Connolly Association, an organisation which continues to this day and whose most famous member was the historian C. Desmond Greaves, author of a number of important works on twentieth-century Irish socialist and republican history, including The Life and Times of James Connolly (1961). Irish Front is an important publication in the history of labour and republican radicalism among the Irish in twentieth-century Britain. I appeal to anyone who may know of any other copies that are available, regardless of whether these be in a library or among your personal papers, in whatever quality, to please get in touch with me at

david DOT convery AT nuigalway DOT ie

Thank you, your help is much appreciated!

[1] George Gilmore, The Irish Republican Congress (Cork: The Cork Workers’ Club, 1978), p. 30.

[2] Patrick Byrne, The Irish Republican Congress Revisited (London: Connolly Publications Ltd, 1994), pp. 21-22.

A Deathly Business: Thompson’s Funeral Home, 1874-1929

Last week, you may recall, I took a look at the consumption of alcohol at funerals based on the recent digitisation of records from Thompson’s funeral directors in Waterford. This week, I’ve returned to the same sources, to consider a few more things which emerge from the records, which offer all kinds of insights into the business of undertaking from the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.

As well as the many more straightforward entries into the books of the business over the course of almost sixty years, many other entries that form part of the digitised collection stand out.

In that period, before the motor car was common, hearses were typically pulled by horses and the records reveal something to us about these. For instance, entries in the books that run from 1874 to the early 1900s, we see that Thompson’s bought a good number of horses. In April 1892, for instance, the business bought a bay horse from a Mrs. Murphy for £20 even, while in 1893, they bought a brown horse from a Mr. Knox of Bakehouse Lane for the considerably more pricey sum of £30. [1] Horses were a vital part of the business, and had to be kept healthy. Thus in one set of records we find recipes for various ailments afflicting horses, like this one “for soars [sic] or galds on horses also Greece in heels” from 1905:

1 pennyworth of ground Alum

1 pennyworth of Sulphur

1/2 Pint of Vinegar

add a small quantity of warm water and then put in a bottle

Or this one, from the same time on worms in horses:

get some Guilea from the country

and grind it up in the oats

it will kill all the worms

There’s also a rather more involved recipe for treating mange:

6d worth tincture of iodine

3d soft soap

4d Black Sulphur

I dram Arnicker (spirits)

This is just once facet of the day to day running of the business which emerges from the books. Among the most fascinating elements of these records is that it shows that more than simply catering to the needs of individuals who were bereaved and had dead to bury, who went to Thompson’s in  a personal capacity,  Thompson’s were also involved in collecting and burying the dead from a variety of institutions including the District Lunatic Asylum (“A Silum” as it appears in some of the very earliest records), The Little Sisters of the Poor, The Poor Law Union, and Waterford’s Prison. [2]

Going through the records and seeing the many nameless in the books who belonged to institutions like the Little Sisters of the Poor makes for difficult reading, but shows something of the way in which the destitute were treated in Irish society, given over to charity, the only ones who would in death, see they were buried in something approaching respectable circumstances. Over two remarkable pages, at the beginning of the books that cover the period 1910-1918, almost seventy entries of paid funerals come from the Little Sisters of the Poor. [3]

Part of the books which show the number of burials performed on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Click to enlarge.

Equally distressing when you delve into the books is the number of “small coffins” or “very small coffins” which are required by various families to bury children who did not live long. In no instance was I able to find a case where the child themselves was named, but usually the entries followed the form of “for Mrs. x’s child”. Unlike the burials of adults, there was no extensive list of hearses, broughams, sidecars, or drink. These were quiet, sad, heart-rending affairs which to judge by their frequency in these books, were indeed very common. Indeed, one set of figures looking at mortality rates in Ireland across the twentieth century indicates that around 1 in 13 or 14 children born died soon afterwards in the 1920s and 1930s, when these digitised records end. [4]

Thompson’s business though wasn’t solely undertaking to bury the dead, as in the case of their individual customers, or organisations like the Poor Law Union or the Little Sisters. Their business for instance with the prison service in Waterford was mainly to do with the transport of prisoners. In one of the books now available online, there are terms of an agreement with the prison set out, including the price of fares for different jobs which reads as follows:

Contract for Horsing Vans And Supplying Cars to H.M. Prison Waterford from April 1st 1909 to 31st March 1910.

No. 1) Horsing Van when requires from Prison to Courthouse and Vice Versa at per day 15/-
No. 2 ) Horsing Van when required between Prison Railway Station at per double journey viz. from Prison to Station in the morning & from Station to Prison in the evening 6/-

3) Horsing Van for any one run viz. between Prison & Station or between Station & Prison 4/– 3/-

4)Inside or Outside Cars when required from Prison to Rly. Station or Steamers or vice versa at per journey from and to Prison 1/3

5) Inside or Outside cars when required from Prison to COurthouse, Workhouse or Asylum at per double journey viz. come to the Prison when ordered go to any of the above places and return to Prison 1/9

6) Rate per single journey between Prison & the above mentioned places not returning again to the Prison 1/3

Date this 19th day of March ’09

An image of the above mentioned price list for the use of Thompson’s cars for the Prison Service. Click to englarge.

Thompson’s contract with the Waterford Poor Law Union about the price of coffins is also present in the records. For the Union, Thompson’s provided three sizes of coffin, as follows in 1907:

Adult coffins 4/3

middle size 2/6

small size 1/6

This small tidbit about their coffin prices for the Poor Law Union are made all the more interesting by the recording of their competitor’s prices, which are given as follows:

Whittle’s prices

4/3

1/9

1/5

Whittle’s offered cheaper on the middle and small coffins, but both businesses offered the same for adults to the Union. Incidentally, both firms appear to have helped each other frequently, charging each other for the use of spare horses, broughams and the like, presumably when one or the other was short of these things but had more than one funeral a day. This is one small glance at the more business oriented side of undertaking, and is invaluable in showing us how such things as the Poor Law, charities, and the prison system operated locally and on a day-to-day scale in either transporting or burying those in their care.

We’ve already seen the highly pragmatic inclusion in these records of a variety of recipes for looking after the horses which were so central to the running of the business, but the books contain recipes relating to human ailment too.  Take for example this entry on “Mugworth” [sic] :

Boil a handful in two qrts of beer

then leave Mistletoe simmer for one

hour strain bottle & Cork.

Dose:- Half a cupfull every

morning. if full dose proves too

difficult to take reduce it to a quarter

cup Morning and Night.

Or this one on Mistletoe:

1/2 lb of Mistletoe boiled in two

quarts of Water. leave simmer

until the liquid is reduced to about

a quart. Mix 1.2 pt. of common black

Treacle with it. liquid to be strained

before Treacle is added.

Dose:- Wineglass full every

morning fasting

“Mugworth is useful in

female irregularities.”

Equal quantities of Pennyroyal

and Southernwood added to it increases

its value.

Mistletoe – Useful in Hysteria, Epilepsy, St Vitus dance

and other nervous complaints, also used

as a tonic especially for the heart:-

These are but a few of the many recipes from the books, more of which I’ll be sure to post in time. For now though, this brief examination of these wonderful records, which are available for anyone to view truly do provide a unique insight into what was and remains one of the most intriguing aspects of social history.

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[1] See Thompson’s Funeral Books, 1874-1892

[2] These are scattered throughout all four sets of the funeral books which have been digitised.

[3] See Thompson’s Funeral Books, 1910-1918 under “L”

[4] These figures are based on the following working paper: http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp200943.pdf

Death, Dying and Drink in early twentieth century Waterford

In popular representations of Irish culture, few things are more celebrated, while all at once, shrouded in mystery than our death rituals. Between removals, wakes, masses and burials, there is scope for rich tradition and variation in seeing off our dead. Famously of course, the Irish wake has taken on something of a life of its own, immortalised in song and story, from Finnegan’s Wake to Johnny Jump Up, two songs where the life-giving properties of whiskey are extolled in raucous fashion.

In Finnegan’s Wake, Tim Finnegan, laid out and all his friends assembled when:

Mickey Maloney ducked his head when a bucket of whiskey flew at him
It missed, and falling on the bed, the liquor scattered over Tim
Bedad he revives, see how he rises, Timothy rising from the bed
Saying “Whittle your whiskey around like blazes, t’underin’ Jaysus, do ye think I’m dead?”

Meanwhile one sorry soul from Cork’s Poor Law Union went through this unfortunate experience:

A man died in the Union by the name of McNabb
They washed him, they laid him outside on a slab
And after O’Connor his measurements did take
His wife took him home for a bloody fine wake

 

Well, about twelve o’clock and the beer it was high
The corpse he sits up and says he with a sigh
“I can’t get to heaven, they won’t let me up
‘Till I bring them a quart of Johnny Jump-Up

While both songs present something of a comical vision of the wake, nevertheless, underlying this humour both songs manage to get to the heart of something important in how the Irish did, and still do, wake the dead before burying them. The wake, and the drinking often done at them, was a central part of the experience, it seems, from some sources. As Noel Hughes, one of those interviewed by Kevin C. Kearns for his book Dublin Tenement Life, had it:

“And everyone would come. You got people who came that didn’t know them. If they heard there’s a good drink they’d come and have a drink. Didn’t know them but they’d know they were going to get a couple of bottles of stout.” [1]

As well as these fabled songs, and the oral testimonies like those collected by Kearns, with the availability of a new source online, from Thompson’s funeral home, of their records from the 1870s right into the early twentieth century we can learn something more again about the practices of death, dying and drinking in early Ireland, and specifically early twentieth century Waterford.

Entries from 1910 for instance show us that drink was an important element of the arrangements made by many people. In the case of the death of Mrs. McTigue from Roanmore, as well as the elm coffin, the hearse, horses, broughams, and habit to cover her face, the account book of Thompson’s notes an order for two dozen stout at the price of five shillings. [2] A few pages down it is noted in the details of the arrangements for the death of Catherine Barry, also of Roanmore, that as well as the hearse, broughams and other more typical expenses of the funeral, there was to be supplied by Thompson’s five dozen stout (at a cost of 12s 6d), two dozen and four minerals (3s 8d), a bottle of whiskey (3s 6d) and a bottle of wine at two shillings. [3]This specificity wasn’t always present with some entries noting simply the addition of “drink” which was sometimes as much as £1 16s or figures such as 17s 6d, as was the case in the death of John O’Brien of Buttermilk Lane in 1915. [4]

When Nicholas Quinlan of Green’s Lane was to be buried later that same year, no expense was to be spared with a “best oak coffin” and driver to Ballybricken at £10. In addition, there was ordered four bottles of wine costing 3s each, with another two bottles of wine prices at 2s each, and finally, a dozen bottles of Bass ale. [5]

In the new year, when Patrick Sutton, who had been resident with the Little Sisters of the Poor, passed away and was to be buried by Thompson’s, part of the funeral expenses included the rather more modest half pint of whiskey (1s 8d), a bottle of “stout and rum” priced at sixpence and further three bottles of stout at a cost of ten and a halfpence. [6]

As with the kind of coffin in which people were buried, so too the kind of drink bought as part of the funeral arrangements said something of the people’s social standing, as the last two examples illustrate most effectively.

As well as buying drink to lubricate those waking the bodies, one woman, Pauline Jones, relates in the film Barrack Street, so-called “crying women” could be bought to attend a wake to cry for the deceased, getting four women for 6d. Jones reckoned that “they’d be half drunk, anyway…” and when asked about what prayers they said, Pauline suggests that “they probably did, made up prayers of their own if I know them, I can imagine….”, she finishes by saying that “the louder they cried and the further they were heard, it was a good wake.” [7]

Such business of course, and such open policy as to who attended wakes as indicated by the testimony of Noel Hughes above, could often lead to trouble, and even legal action. One such example from Waterford in the early part of the twentieth century comes from a court case reported in the paper between John Breen of Bridge Street, and Thomas Dunphy a blacksmith from Ballybricken, a son-in-law of the deceased, and Jane Flynn, the niece of a late Captain James Harpur. Breen was seeking the return of a sum of money, £2 4s 6d, for goods bought by Dunphy and Flynn as part of the wake for Captain Harpur. However, Jane Flynn insisted that all of the money used and spent was not for the benefit of Harpur’s wake but for Dunphy and his friends, including three dozen bottles of stout. The court found in favour Breen and the cost of paying fell to his niece, the damage between the family members was not, of course, recorded. [8]

Drink, then, was a vital and sometimes controversial part of the waking of bodies in Waterford in the early twentieth century. This isn’t the only thing which comes through from the records of Thompson’s funeral directors about the nature of death and burial in early twentieth century Ireland, so keep an eye out here for more in the coming weeks.

 

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[1] Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History, Dublin: Gill and MacMillan 1994, p.200

[2] Thompson Funeral Books, 1910-1918, June 12 1910

[3] Thompson Funeral Books, 1910-1918, June 23 1910

[4] Thompson Funeral Books, 1910-1918, April 19 1915

[5] Thompson Funeral Books, 1910-1918, December 23 1915

[6] Thompson Funeral Books, 1910-1918, January 6 1916

[7] Mark Power (dir.), Barrack Street, 2013, see 20:36 to 21:08 in particular.

[8] Munster Express, January 11 1908

De-industrialization, heritage, and the recession: Waterford, 2009-2014

Reading Alex Niven’s  Folk Opposition this week, I was engaged particularly by the passages that looked at what Nivens titled ‘Oppositional geography’ where he discusses in the book the remaking of the Newcastle/Gateshead docklands during the years of New Labour and the building of new bridges like The Millenium, Newcastle’s sixth bridge, The Baltic art gallery, and the concert venue, The Sage. All of it, after the positivity of the early Blairite years passed, the recession hit, Newcastle in Niven’s view, ended up with little more than a “cosmetic growth” bereft of a meaningful “social or economic infrastructure”, something which “which was certainly not one of the legacies of cultural regeneration”.[1] This struck a particular chord with me when thinking of Waterford and its fortunes since the beginning of the recession. My knowledge of Waterford history has grown thanks to my PhD research, in the very period when Waterford seems to have very little else to look to for comfort. It’s hurlers haven’t delivered on so much promise, its football club is low down in the League of Ireland First Division, each sport in the city left harking back to what was and what might have been. Like Newcastle, and plenty of other parts of England and the rest of Britain, Waterford is a city whose identity has had to shift as manufacturing (and shipping before it) declined.

With the exception of a handful of projects, the city centre in Waterford was until the recession relatively untouched during the Tiger. Among the changes to the city’s landscape – its physical but also social and cultural geography – was the fairly nebulous concept of the “John Street Village”, that saw most of the city’s nightlife being squashed into one unmanageable area that deprived the rest of the city centre of passing footfall once the shops closed, and the pedestrianisation of what became John Roberts Square. Another contentious development in the early 1990s was that of City Square, built on Arundel Square and which while incorporating some of the city walls found during the development of the shopping centre, still more could have been done to excavate the area. John Roberts Square were both reasonably successful ventures excepting the lack of licensed premises in that part of the city thanks to the afformentioned village, which amounted to little more than a poor mans attempt at Temple Bar minus the culture. Other changes included the building of the Millenium Plaza, which has been quite successful especially on those occasions when Waterford has been host to the Tall Ships Festival, once prior to the recession and once since. Not unlike what Nivens had to say of England’s north-east, many of these changes to the city during the Tiger merely papered over the cracks off the effects of de-industrialization and regional neglect, the true effects of which did not begin to be felt until 2009.

Back in 2009, the first and most visible sign that the recession had come to Waterford was the closing up of the Waterford Crystal factory. I remember the day distinctly: it was late in January and I had just got off the bus from Cork, it was an aptly grim day, and my mother told me that the factory was to close and that the workers had locked themselves in when security came to shut the doors to begin the process of receivership. It was the first sit-in, an occupation of a workplace, that I had ever seen, and was to set a precedent for the coming years in Ireland, and in Waterford.

As well as the site of the factory, this huge tranche of land directly across my street was also home to the Waterford Crystal visitor centre. All through my childhood and especially in summer, coach upon coach with visitors from near and far (it was a perennial lazy school tour/day-out choice too, I remember three such visits!) could be seen entering the factory and the visitor centre to take the tours. Now all of that would stop. In the past number of months, work was begun to demolish the plant for a new redevelopment of the site. In the same period, a major transformation of a moribund part of Waterford began, and the new House of Waterford Crystal, a brand new visitor centre and showroom was opened in the old ESB building on the quay. This same area, now the Viking Triangle [2], being based around a section of the original Viking settlement of the city and centering in particular on Reginald’s Tower, the Bishop’s Palace and the new Chorister’s Hall, each in turn telling a different aspect of the city’s history, inviting you to enjoy 1000 years of history in 1000 footsteps. I should state that each of the three museums are wonderful and display brilliantly many aspects of the city’s history – from our Viking beginnings through our ecclesiastical history when Waterford was described by some as Parva Roma (little Rome) through our Georgian history and on to the history of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from pig-buyer’s strikes to the Royal Showband. These are all wonderful and important additions to the cultural and the social life of the city. Yet, the clash between heritage and history, the contradictions that are wrapped up in a city which anyone will tell you is economically on its knees and can turn only to its past for answers, is striking.

Demolition of Waterford Crystal begins. Source: http://www.rte.ie

In recent times, Waterford has seen yet more sit-ins and actions from workers in Europrice, The Park Inn, and as part of the campaign run nationally by Elvery’s to retain their jobs. Job losses have been felt in TalkTalk and Honeywell and plenty of other places as well. Work is scarce in Waterford, and each time I’m home, and a little more of the Glass factory is knocked down, and the site cleared, it acts as a reminder that for all the regeneration around The Mall and the Viking Triangle, heritage – so important, and so vital to any city that has as proud a one as Waterford – can not alone save a city. Waterford Crystal may well indeed have had a “unique place in industrial history for its blending of mass production and high art” but today it is both a part of Waterford’s growing heritage industry and a pile of rubble across my street.[3] Important though it is to understand and celebrate that history and heritage, it is worth taking note of Niven’s conclusions about the north-east of England, and to ensure that the strides made by the new developments in the city celebrating its past, don’t become mere window dressing over a deeper problem.

 

[1] Alex Niven, Folk Opposition, Alresford: Zero Books, p.44

[2] See the report on the Viking Triangle here:http://www.waterfordcity.ie/documents/notices/Viking%20Triangle.pdf%5B

3] Brian F. Havel, Maestro of Crystal: The Story of Miroslav Havel and His Role in Waterford Crystal, Dublin: Currach Press 2005, p.270. See also Eleanor Flegg, “Tradition in Transition”, Irish Arts Review, Spring 2014: http://www.irishartsreview.com/tradition-in-transition/

Prague: Silence, History and the Magical City

Before I ever started visiting Prague with regularity, the city was increasingly on my radar thanks to the writing of Tony Judt. I began reading Tony Judt when one of my sisters bought me his monumental Postwar for Christmas a number of years ago and through friends I discovered more of Judt’s work just as his illness seemed to have finally conquered him. His final few works which include The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares The Land and his conversation with Timothy Snyder, Thinking The Twentieth Century, all give special mention to the Czech Republic and to Prague and to the famed Prague Spring of 1968. Since I began reading this work, a change in personal circumstances has meant that I now visit Prague on a regular basis and over the course of my accumulated visits, I have learned incrementally more and more about the city, about the Czech lands and their history. I have toyed with the idea of writing something about this oft-written-about city previously for The Dustbin, but for the first time, and following my most recent visit, I feel I finally have something to offer up, something like a coherent thought about the place…

 

“It is as if we conjure the dead and they speak only

Through our own damned trumpets, through our damned medium:”[1]

 

These lines of Jack Spicer’s from his poem Imaginary Elegies sum up for me the job of the historian, and the care we need to take when we conjure the dead through our damned medium: our damned medium being history. A poetic expression of EP Thompson’s famed rallying call to rescue people from the condescension of posterity, it also acknowledges that when historian’s conjure up the dead, in whatever fashion, they make noise again where there has since been silence.

Like many European capitals, the sheer wealth and depth of the history that courses through the streets of Prague can be overwhelming for the visitor – from the remarkable architectural heritage to be found at places like Vysehrad, St. Vitus’ Cathedral, the Charles Bridge and the Waldstein Palace to the seemingly endless public statuary that reminds one constantly through works that are sometimes simple and other times monumental in every sense, of the long deep history which the streets of the city have had to bear from Hussite Revolution to Fascist invasion and much more besides. In that respect, Prague can like so many great cities, seem to be drowning in its own history and the competition moreover of each of these different facets of the city’s history to interest and intrigue the thousands upon thousands of tourists wending their way through Old Town past the sellers of knick-knacks and tack. But as with all cityscapes which are teeming with the weight of so much history, pulling you in different directions and through centuries as you turn from one street to the next, crossing one set of tram tracks at the end of a square to turn on to another, there is also the presence of how silent those pasts can actually be, despite this noisome melange.

What turned my mind to the notion of silence was a number of exhibitions I viewed on my most recent trip to Prague. At the DOX, the contemporary art gallery, there were three particular exhibits that upon reflection had something vital to say about history and silence. The three exhibitions of which I am thinking are the poster as propaganda, 1914-2014, an exhibit of various samizdat publications and finally an exhibition of the Chinese photographer Liu Xia. Reflecting on all three of these exhibitions as I saw them together under the one roof, the theme of silence (especially imposed silence), especially strong in Liu Xia’s work, struck me as equally important to the other two exhibits as well.

The enforced silence of Liu Xia, under house arrest since her husband won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, is a silence that must no doubt resonate deeply and strongly in Prague, a city where silence under the Nazi and Communist regimes was a part of everyday life. With every visit to the city, you become more and more acutely aware of all that has passed on its streets and squares. The different exhibitions that I saw at the DOX each taught me something important about how to understand the history of the Czech Republic and its capital.

The first exhibition on the poster as propaganda tool was a fascinating sweeping history of the twentieth century in central Europe first but gradually widened out to consider other global struggles and revolutions, the onset of globalization, the war on terror and the recent crisis of late capitalism. What struck me as particularly interesting was the periodization of the exhibition. Periodization is a vexed issue at the best of times for historians but the lay out of this exhibition was particularly interesting in terms of the periodization that was employed. Some standard periods were employed such as 1918-1939, but it was towards the post Second World War era that things got interesting in this regard. There was no periodization from 1945-1968, as one might have thought given the shift that was caused by the Prague Spring and its aftermath, or from 1968 to 1989 and the Velvet Revolution – instead the exhibition went with the far broader brush stroke of 1945-1989. Perhaps this was to indicate the wider battle between both sides in the Cold War. Yet, for the Czech people that broader period is probably best understood in terms of the Soviet takeover in 1948 until the Prague Spring in 1968 and from the subsequent “normalization” period that followed until the emergence of Charter 77 and then the Velvet Revolution. The silencing of these two distinctive periods in Czech history meant that the exhibition was to be understood by those who saw it in this much grander narrative, but robbed the viewer of the nuance that a more atomized periodization would have provided.[2]

One of the more striking posters displayed was a Czech poster imploring people not to forget Lidice, a town carpet bombed out of existence by the Nazis in retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heidrich. Film footage of the town’s destruction was powerful but so too is the knowledge that all official records of the town were destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to eradicate, to silence, this place out of history. This was a violent kind of censorship, an important theme that carried over elsewhere in the gallery and in particular in the exhibition of Liu Xia’s photography.

The photographs being exhibited were disturbing in their sense of claustrophobia, but perhaps the most disturbing element of the entire exhibit was the room containing the last filmed footage of Liu Xia since she was under house arrest. In this video too, silence was a powerful thing. The video was taken by two friends of the photographer who made a daring, and successful, attempt to enter the photographers home, they breathlessly rush to the top of the stairs and then as viewers we see Liu Xia whisper, quite silently, messages into one of her two friends ears before both decide it would be better and safer to leave of their own volition. This coupled with the photographs give extra meaning to the exhibitions title “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia”.[3] In the video we see the silence of secrecy between friends, another important theme in recent Czech history and something which informed the movement that produced the various samizdat publications that were the life’s blood of many artists and writers who were not a part of the official culture of normalization – writers like Bohumil Hrabal or Vaclav Havel. The particular samizdat publication which was the focus of the DOX exhibit was Pražská imaginace (Prague imagination). [4]

Here again in the samizdat publication we see a kind of silence that was brought on by the effects of normalization – the retreat from public life into the private world and what Tony Judt has described as “pro forma political conformism”.[5] It was in this private rather than public world that samizdat publications circulated. The weird state of difference between one’s public face and private opinion has recently been examined by Paulina Bren who asked “what then was ‘normal’ about normalization? That nothing, and yet everything, was normal was hinted at by ordinary citizens’ own adoption of the term…”[6] In such a world, and again as Bren notes, in a world where whats passes for normal is a state in which there is nothing happening, then the silent, covert writing, publication and reading of samizdat work becomes an important whisper in an otherwise silent society. It was in precisely this context which Czech action art emerged. As Pavlina Morganova has recently written of early Czech action art, its function was as “a public performance and an attempt to penetrate the routine lives of other people.”[7] In other words, an attempt to break the silence, the stillness, imposed by communism and particularly its normalized form after 1968.

Vladimír Havlík, Experimental Flower, 1981. Source: http://www.artlist.cz/?id=1222

So in the magical city of Kakfa, the Golem, of Kepler, there were disruptions of the everyday with the hanging of empty frames on streets to create fleeting images, cobblestones were replaced by flowers, and Czech artists interrupted the silence of normalization by actions and activity that was often collective. Magic was returned in fleeting moments that only some may have seen, and they may have been amused, bemused, or cheered by these noisy moments that have left no physical traces today, but whose power is not silent, or silenced. Such are the moments that make history.

 

[1] Jack Spicer, “Imaginary Elegies, I-IV”, in Allen, Donald M., The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, Berkely: Univesity of California Press [1999 edn.], p.143

[2] Jaroslav Anděl (curator),“The Poster in the Clash of Ideologies, 1914-2014”, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 14 February-19 May 2014.

[3] Liu Xia, “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia” (exhibition), DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. Exhibition runs from 28 February-9 June 2014.

[4]Jiří Hůla (curator), “Pražská imaginace, 1985-2005”, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. Exhibition officially ran from 6 March-20 April 2014.

[5] Judt, Tony and Snyder, Timothy, Thinking the Twentieth Century, London: Wiliam Heinemann 2012, p.234

[6] Bren, Paulina, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2010, p.3

[7] Morganova, Pavlina, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain, Prague: Karolinum Press 2014, p.49