The recent announcement that the Virtual Treasury project, with its mission to recover archival records lost in the fire that wrecked the Public Record Office (PRO) at the start of the Civil War in 1922, has retrieved 60,000 names from the pre-famine census records that were destroyed, garnered much national and international interest.
Boldly imaginative and ambitious, this project was conceived by Dr Peter Crooks of Trinity College Dublin in 2015 and has involved great effort on the part of archivists and historians to locate material in Irish and international archives. An all-island collaborative research endeavour, it involves millions of words being “linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections” of numerous archives, including as far away as Australia.
A project supported by the State, it is a reminder of Ireland’s leading role in digitising and making accessible archival sources, previously underlined by the success of the digitisation and free access to the 1901 and 1911 census returns. Crooks has maintained that the Virtual Treasury project is guided by the spirit of Herbert Wood, the deputy keeper of the PRO, which was established by the Public Record Act (Ireland) 1867. Wood saw the archival records as belonging to the public, not academics: “The history of a country is founded upon its archives, and the preservation not only of its public but also of its private documents”. He was devastated by the incineration of the priceless records in 1922, as “the Irish Record Office is starting again like a new country almost without a history”.
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In 1930, Wood spoke of “how the body of public records may be reconstructed from duplicates or copies which may be found in other repositories or which have fortunately been printed ... to the numerous literary searchers, who, for over half a century, have been seeking material for their studies in the Record Office, we must be grateful, for much of the result of their research has appeared in print, and thus copies of many a document have been preserved ... It will be a useful and interesting work for some student to wade through all the Irish antiquarian publications and note any copies of public records appearing in those publications.”
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Almost a century on, that work is being embraced with gusto and it is a cultural achievement to be admired. Another relevant spirit in this context is that of Robert Dudley Edwards, UCD professor of modern Irish history from 1944 to 1979, who devoted much of his career to raising archival awareness and whose work and complex personality are uncovered in detail in a new book by his granddaughter Neasa MacErlean, Telling the Truth is Dangerous: How Robert Dudley Edwards Changed Irish History Forever.
Dudley Edwards was no saint and the book underlines how he could at times be disputative, inebriated and cruel, but he was an inspiring teacher and had an exceptional sense of purpose and public service. He spent much time traversing the country building awareness of the need to preserve local and national and personal and private documents. As someone centrally involved in building the framework for the academic study of history, he emphasised the importance of proper training and methodological soundness for historians and established the archives department in UCD.
He was equally aware of the importance of extending the reach of history and archives beyond the confines of the university. Exactly 50 years ago he was vocal about the need for proper archives legislation in Ireland, as in its absence “historians will necessarily have to rely on British archives for the last word” on Irish history. The answer to his plea eventually came with the National Archives Act of 1986, implemented just before his death in 1988.
It is striking how the preoccupations and central messages of both Wood and Dudley Edwards continue to resonate, especially during this era when there is, in some quarters, such a cavalier and dangerous distortion of history and contempt for evidence, and where skewed and selective accounts of the past are weaponised, with devastating results. Dudley Edwards and his generation of historians were particularly mindful of that danger given that they came to public prominence during and after the second World War.
In addition, some of the Irish historians of that era who studied in Britain before returning to Ireland, were, as noted by Robert’s son Owen, also a historian, “in a state of boiling rage at the ignorance of Irish history among English historians”. Dudley Edwards was happy, however, to invite British historian Herbert Butterfield to Dublin 80 years ago to deliver a lecture. Butterfield outlined what should be the essential mission of the historian: “seeking only to make human understanding more profound”.
That task is not the preserve of the professional historian; it is relevant to anyone who takes the past seriously.
