Kate Manning & Cormac O'Malley
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Readers of this blog will know of my recent interest in Helen Hooker O'Malley, wife of Ernie O'Malley. Both NLI and the Gallery of Photography have recent exhibitions of her photographs and the Dublin City Libraries & Archive had a recent exhibition of her theatre sets.
Now I'm moving on to Ernie himself. By a great stroke of fortune, Diarmuid Peavoy, a former classsmate of mine and friend of the O'Malley family, is out of town and could not attend this event. He generously suggested to the organisers that they invite me in his place. Thanks Diarmuid - had a ball.
The occasion was the formal launch by Ernie's son Cormac of the papers of Frances-Mary Blake. And who was she? The text below from her obituary in An Phoblacht should tell you all you need to know for the moment.
A researcher and writer on the Irish Civil War, she was a member of the Troops Out Movement, a supporter of Irish political prisoners and their families, and an activist on human rights and justice generallyCormac was also launching some additional Ernie O'Malley papers previously presented to the archive.
In the mid-1970s, she sorted and catalogued one of the largest collections of historical documents of the Civil War period for the Archives Department of University College Dublin. Following her work on the papers of IRA officer Ernie O’Malley, she edited his best-selling book on the Civil War, ‘The Singing Flame’. Frances also worked on and wrote the introduction for ‘Raids and Rallies’, another book extracted from O’Malley’s papers about the Tan War. Later she wrote ‘The Irish Civil War – and what it still means for the Irish people’, which outlined her own views of that period.
Source
The event was introduced by Kate who is Principal Archivist at UCD Archives.
John is the UCD librarian. In expressing the Library's gratitude for the later material he reminded us that Cormac had given Ernie's papers to the Library way back in 1974.
These contained 53 notebooks which are manuscript transcripts (in Ernie's own atrocious handwriting) of interviews with some 400 former participants in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Some 160 of these were people who also made official witness statements but the balance consisted of those who were not prepared to give statements to the Bureau of Military History at the time, but who trusted O'Malley.
The notebooks have been available to researchers but the handwriting has been a dreadful impediment to making sense of them.
The good news is that they are to be digitised and transcribed, the first results to appear in 2022. Up to now the only online aid has been a list of interviewees and their locations.
This will be my third encounter with Cormac in a matter of months. I mentioned the first two occasions above and these dealt with his mother Helen Hooker O'Malley.
I had been unaware of Ernie's interviews until very recently and I wondered if by any chance the rabid Republican Medlars might have been involved. Kate told me about the list at this event and I see the Medlars were not interviewed. However, they may have been mentioned by others, as was the case in the official witness statements. So I'm looking forward to the 2022 digitisation results if I'm still around by then.
Cormac was hugely entertaining about Frances-Mary Blake, whom he knew well. She was, in effect, Ernie's biographer. She knew Ernie well and had done a massive amount of research, including I think Cormac said over 100 interviews. No doubt the book was forming in her head but she never got round to writing it. So the papers, presented to the archive by her estate in 2010, and now being launched by Cormac, will prove invaluable.
Cormac has been very generous with material. He recently loaned Helen's theatre papers to Dublin City Archive where they have been digitised and catalogued. I have it from a reliable source that Dublin City Librarian, Margaret Owens, is very enthusiastic about having an exhibition of the theatrical aspect of Helen's life.
Cormac told us how he had suggested a number of counterfactuals about Ernie's life to Frances-Mary. What if Ernie had not escaped when he did and had been tried and hanged? What if he had escaped when he didn't? What would he have gone on to do?
Apparently Frances-Mary wrote three of these up into brilliant stories, her knowing Ernie so well, and Cormac is hoping that some day they'll be published.
I mentioned the (decoding and) digitisation of the notebooks. This is to be undertaken by Anne along with Eve Morrison.
Anne is a wonderful historian, with an open mind and full of curiosity. I was enthralled by her follow up of Michael Collins's squad through the newly released Military Pensions Records at the recent full day session in Cathal Brugha Barracks.
Eve has a long history dealing with the notebooks and the two of them should make a great team.
To quote Kate:
The work is being facilitated by a piece of software called @Transkribus but it couldn't happen without the skills of Anne Dolan and Eve Morrison and their knowledge of the O'Malley papers and notebooks.
The project has just begun and we envisage the first publications appearing in 2022, both online and in print.
Sarah Poutch
Kate and archivist Sarah Poutch have already catalogued both collections of papers which are being formally launched at this event.
Enough of the business. I had some very interesting conversations with people I had previously met and with some completely new people.
Étáin O'Malley
Étáin is Cormac's sister and I had met her at the earlier events. I met her husband, Bud Root-Michels, for the first time at this event. He has a long and varied career both as a fine artist and, would you believe, a sometime political cartoonist. I didn't realise the last bit when I was talking to him or the conversation might have gone down a different track. Perhaps we'll meet again sometime.
Rory O'Hanlon & Joe Lee
I have met Rory now in a few places but it was my first time meeting Joe face to face. I had long ago attended his launching a book by Cormac Ó Gráda but I had never spoken to him. It was a reference to that launch that prompted me to point out a similarity between Cormac and Anne. And this provoked him in turn to tell me a family/academic secret which I have now put under seal for 70 years.
Cécile Gordon
Apart from her Military Pensions work, which she enjoys enormously, Cécile is no mean athlete and she gave me some lessons in the technical aspects of her latest bout.
So just to finish up, I didn't have the time or the inclination then to check out some of the displays in the room but I nicked the two below from the UCD Archives Twitter stream.
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It doesn't take long to spot the significance of this plan of the Four Courts with the words Records and Munitions side by side.
I had never heard of this Alfred Cope fellow before. This goes a bit further than Shemus's cartoon of Wilson but there you are.
I said in the post that I'd never heard of Cope. It turns out that this is not correct. Felix Larkin who wrote the definitive work, on the Shemus cartoons in the Freeman's Journal, which I have read, points out that he deals with Andy Cope (on P.18) of the book.
ReplyDeleteI fished the book off one of my myriad shelves this morning, and, of course, he's right. It just goes to show how selective memory can be, particularly when not buttressed by other links.
I will henceforth never forget Andy Cope short of dementia (God forbid).