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The forgotten children: the conservation of a charter-school register

Damaged Kevin Street register before treatment. (MS 5632)

The conservation treatment of a register of children from a Charter School in Kevin Street, Dublin has been recently completed. The item (TCD MS 5632) is part of a collection of registers and documents given to Trinity College Dublin by the Incorporated Society for Promoting Protestant Schools in Ireland in 1971.

The Incorporated Society for the Promotion of Protestant Schools in Ireland was an initiative by the archbishops and bishops of the Established Church following the failure of the penal laws, introduced as a way of converting the Catholic Irish to Protestantism; the aim of this initiative was to convert Catholic children while instruct them in the English language and “the fundamental principles of true religion” and then to send the boys to apprenticeship programmes and the girls to employment as servants.  

The Society started after a grant charter in 1733 that gave to the Incorporated Society the power to accept gifts, benefactions and lands for the support and maintenance of the schools where the children of the “Irish natives” would be educated. In order to ensure their conversion and prevent regression to their old religion, the practice of “transplantation” was adopted and the children were moved to districts as far away as possible from their homes. Initially gathered together at the Kevin Street School in Dublin, they were sent from there either by canal or road, to their designated destination. 

By 1769 there were 52 schools with over 2000 students. The project garnered a bad reputation, a view held not only by Catholics, but also among Protestants, due to the children receiving little instruction or training, but rather being exploited as farm labourers or weavers.

Following several inspections carried out from 1780 and 1825 the reputation of the schools had become so poor that potential employers of the children leaving the schools were unwilling to accept the Charter School’s children because they were reported to be “slothful, dirty and vicious”.

Funds and public aid were gradually withdrawn from the Society from 1827 and government financial assistance ceased entirely in 1832. The Society remained in existence and changed into a promoter of second level schools for Protestant children.

The recently-conserved register, which is part of one of the largest archives in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library,  contains the names of all the children who were transferred to and from the Kevin Street School in the years from 1793 to 1823. The entry for each child registered includes name, age, religion, the place where they came from and their destination, with a space left for special annotations, such as apprenticeships, or their return to their family because they had been “admitted without knowledge or consent” of their parents. Attempted elopement and subsequent transfer to the penitentiary for young criminals, illness and death were also documented.

The register is a full reverse calf stationery binding over pasteboards with two broad bands of Russia banded leather attached to front and back boards, and across the spine fixed with parchment tackets. It was originally sewn on four parchment straps laced into the covers. The text block is pen ruled machine-made paper, with watermarks: “C Taylor” on the first sheet of the bifolium and a crown atop of a shield containing a fleur de lis with a GR monogram below on the second sheet.

The book had been exposed to a high level of humidity and dust. The first and last sections were heavily damaged by mould as were the top half of the pages in the remainder of the book block. The back folds of the sections and the sewing structure had been also severely damaged by the mould resulting in the complete destruction of the spine. The leather cover was damaged and stained with losses in some areas.

Front cover (MS 5632)

The pasteboards were mostly delaminated and heavily damaged by mould resulting in an overall weakness and loss of structure.

 The treatment, which due to the poor condition and fragility of the register, took a period of two months, involved: paper consolidation, washing of some pages to remove soluble staining and stabilise the pH, restoration of losses using paper infills, and guarding of all the sections. The textblock was re-sewn and lined; restoration and reconstruction of the binding boards completed, followed by rebacking with new reverse calfskin.

 

 

 

 

Angelica Anchisi, Heritage Council Conservation Intern, 2018/2019

  1. Milne, The Irish charter schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin, 1997)
    J. Robins, The lost children: a study of charity children in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Dublin, 1987)

‘Objects of raging detestation’ the charter schools