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Davitt Down Under

Michael Davitt, who was born in 1846 and died in 1906, was a radical Irish nationalist, social reformer and champion of the Irish diaspora of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Davitt’s papers are held in the Manuscripts’ Department of the Library of Trinity College Dublin. The photographs within the collection are in the process of being catalogued and digitised.

In 1895, Michael Davitt departed Dublin for a tour of Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Hawaii and the United States.

Mining shacks in Tipperary Flat, Queensland, 1895

One of the aims of the tour was to re-connect with the Irish communities in Australia after Charles Stewart Parnell’s adulterous relationship with Kitty O’Shea became public knowledge and caused major damage to the Irish Parliamentary Party’s (IPP) reputation internationally.

Irish-Australians had been major financial contributors to Irish famine relief, the IPP and the Land League throughout the nineteenth century. Their support was essential for continuing the campaign towards Irish Home Rule in Westminster. Other reasons for the tour were personal; including Davitt’s need to make money for his family by lecturing in Australia and New Zealand.

MS 9477/4425 Telegraph from Mary to Michael Davitt, 1895

During Davitt’s journey to Australia, disaster struck his family in Ireland, when his six-year-old daughter Kathleen died suddenly from the flu. However, Davitt’s wife pressed him to continue his ‘mission’, in a telegram he received from Mary in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Following his wife’s advice, Davitt continued on his voyage to Australia.

Following his tour of Australia and New Zealand, Davitt published Life and Progress in Australasia in 1897. His book focuses on the gold rush in Western Australia and particularly on the town of Coolgardie.

MS 9649/348 Crowd of men at a sale of mining lots in Coolgardie, 1895

Davitt describes Coolgardie as ‘full of the gold-seeking fever’, with miners from vastly different backgrounds. In his diary for Western Australia MS 9565 he lists these as ‘any number of men with University training, pressmen, politicians, barristers, lawyers…all here on same gold hunting purpose’. The independence of the miners from the Australian authorities is illustrated by his photographs of a fire on Bailey Street in Coolgardie, which he reports in his diary was caused by the burning of an effigy of the Mayor of the town.

MS 9649/373 Group of Aboriginal Australians under a tree near Great Boulder, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 1895

Davitt includes an interview with Catholic bishop Matthew Gibney in his book. Gibney discusses the mistreatment of Aborigines, the privatisation of Aboriginal land and hunting grounds in Western Australia. In Life and Progress Davitt declares that ‘the white man’s law justifies him in stealing the black man’s country, his wife, and daughters whenever he wants them; but to take a sheep from this moral professor of the ten commandments is to earn the penalty of a bullet!’

Davitt, as a radical politician and writer from a famine emigrant, working class background, was an important figure to the Irish diaspora in Australia. Davitt’s family were part of the million people who emigrated from Ireland to England, the United States and Australia to escape starvation after the failure of the potato crop during the Irish Great Famine. His importance to the Irish diaspora is evident throughout the Davitt photographic collection as large welcoming committees were organised to from MS 9649/32 below, where Davitt is welcomed at the train station in Maryborough, Victoria, Australia.

Reception Committee for Davitt during his lecture tour of Australia
in Maryborough, Victoria, 1895

The online catalogue has now been updated and can be viewed here.

Dáire Rooney

Digitising the Michael Davitt photographic collection at the Library of Trinity College Dublin: MS 9649.

MS 9649/17 Davitt wearing a Russian fur coat and hat, Moscow, 1905

Trinity College Library is home to the papers of Michael Davitt, 1846-1906. Davitt was a convicted Fenian, Irish nationalist, Irish Parliamentary Party MP, investigative journalist and agrarian campaigner, who is well known for being one of the founders of the Irish National Land League. This extensive collection was presented to TCD library from 1978 to 1980 by Davitt’s son, Cahir Davitt and includes over 6000 letters, 550 photographs, 40 diaries as well as newspaper cuttings, published pamphlets and articles.

The Davitt photographic collection provides a visual record of the latter half of Davitt’s career, when he toured across the prairies and mountains of Northwest Canada, the gold fields of Australia and the battlefields of South Africa during the Second Boer War. The photographs document Davitt’s investigations, as a social campaigner and journalist, into the migration of Scottish crofters to Northwest Canada following the Highland Clearances, the Murray River communal settlements in South Australia, the rush to settle Western Australia fuelled by the gold fields at Coolgardie and the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom in the Russian Empire.

MS 9649/296 Scottish crofter family, the McKenzie’s wearing their ‘best’ in Manitoba, Canada, 1891
MS 9649/280 First Nation Canoe in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 1891

Davitt was an important figure to a generation of the Irish diaspora who migrated from Ireland to the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand after the devastation of the Great Famine. As a migrant himself, his family left Mayo for Haslingden in Lancashire, his commitment to improving the lives of agricultural tenants and labourers in rural Ireland through his work in the Land League cemented his reputation amongst Irish people living abroad. This is demonstrated in MS 9649/32, which depicts a large crowd of people gathered to welcome Davitt to Maryborough in Victoria.

These photographs are currently being catalogued and digitised. While the Davitt collection is one of the most heavily used historic collections in Trinity Library, this important and extensive collection of photographs within the Davitt papers is less well known due to limited cataloguing. The project aims to update the existing catalogue, the digitisation of the photographs and the publishing of the photographs on Trinity’s digital collections repository to increase accessibility to this significant collection.

The online catalogue has now been updated and can be viewed here.

Dáire Rooney

MS 9649/32 Reception Committee for Davitt during his lecture tour of Australia in Maryborough, Victoria, 1895

The Michael Davitt Papers in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library

Carla King, Michael Davitt After the Land League 1882-1906The Michael Davitt Papers, held in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library, are a rich source for historians of late nineteenth-century Ireland. Davitt, a Mayo-born man of humble origins, was one of the leading political figures of the day. He exerted a significant influence over popular opinion, as an author, journalist and public speaker in Ireland, Britain, and internationally. For many years, Dr Carla King has studied this rich collection, in preparation for her newly published study, Michael Davitt After the Land League. Here she reflects upon Davitt’s life, the provenance of the Davitt papers, and the invaluable insights which the collection offers to researchers. Continue reading “The Michael Davitt Papers in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library”

Scotland the Brave: Manuscripts from Scotland

TCD MS 226 f4r
TCD MS 226 f4r

As Scotland makes an historic decision today, this is a good opportunity to highlight some of the sources for the study of Scottish history within the M&ARL collections.

TCD MS 498 p320
TCD MS 498 p320

Displayed here is a page of a fifteenth-century copy of the earliest attempt to write a continuous history of Scotland: John de Fordun’s Scotichronicon (TCD MS 498). Fordun wrote his history in response to the removal and destruction of many national records by the English King Edward III, grandson of the infamous ‘Hammer of the Scots’, Edward I. The page shown features an account of the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297, when the forces of William Wallace and Andrew de Moray defeated the combined English forces of John de Warenne, 7th earl of Surrey, and Hugh de Cressynghame, near Stirling on the river Forth.

 

TCD MS 1289 p313
TCD MS 1289 p313

Also in the M&ARL collection are two copies of the Senchus fer n-Alban, (TCD MS 1289 and 1298), a genealogical text originating from the oral tradition and codified in later manuscripts. The Senchus provides both a mythical and historical record of the ‘history of the men of Scotland’ from their Dal Riata origins and, in a description of an encounter in 719 AD, includes the earliest reference to a naval battle off British shores.

 

TCD MS 226 f3r
TCD MS 226 f3r

TCD MS 226 is a beautiful twelfth-century religious manuscript of the sermons of St Augustine and other texts originating from Kelso Abbey in the Scottish Borders. The text is heavily decorated and as such is a rare survival among Scottish medieval manuscripts.

 

TCD MS 7574
TCD MS 7574

The M&ARL collection also contains what might be termed as ‘Jacobite relics’, including the elaborate marriage certificate of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s parents, ‘The Old Pretender’, James III to Maria Clementina Sobieski in 1719 (TCD MS 7574). There is also an early manuscript copy of Robert Burns’ poem ‘Address to the Deil [devil]’ (TCD MS 10664 p 95) contained in a volume of poems by William Young, curate of Magheraculmoney, Co Fermanagh, 1720-c1757.

M&ARL holds nineteenth-century tour journals of trips to Scotland and political papers including those of James Connolly (TCD MS 11074) executed in 1916. Connolly was born in Edinburgh and had links to the Scottish socialist movement. M&ARL also holds the papers of Michael Davitt (TCD MS 9535), who became involved in the Crofters’ war of the 1880s and toured Scotland in 1882.

Of course the most famous manuscript with a Scottish link is the Book of Kells, which may have been produced, in part, on Iona, off the coast of Scotland, by Irish monks in the ninth century.

Estelle Gittins

Michael Davitt and the Gaelic Athletic Association

September is the busiest month in the GAA calendar with the minor and senior All Ireland finals in both football and hurling being played in Croke Park. This year Mayo will contest both football finals making it an ideal time to display Brendon Deacy’s work on Mayo native Michael Davitt (1846-1906) ‘Life in relief’ in the BLU exhibition case.

A life in relief
Brendon Deacy. ‘A life in relief’

With its foundation on 1 November 1884 at a meeting in Hayes Hotel, Thurles, The Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes grew to become known today as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin, conveners of the meeting, passed a motion to appoint Archbishop Thomas Croke, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt as patrons of the new association. By that time, Davitt was a figure of national importance principally due to his involvement with the foundation of the Irish Land League in 1879, when he moved from being a Fenian activist to campaigning for land nationalism by peaceful and political means. Davitt’s involvement with the GAA included a contribution to the 1888 rulebook and a financial bailout of £450 to the doomed promotional tour of America in the same year. His generosity may have been spurred on by his initial guarantee at the 1884 meeting that the Irish in America would contribute half of the £1,000 required to stage a Gaelic Association competition to include Gaelic games and track & field sports.

Printed by The Letterpress Print Workshop at the National College of Art and Design in 2006 to mark the centenary of Davitt’s death, Brendon Deacy’s work is described as a novel without words. It uses the medium of linoleum printing to depict the main events in Davitt’s life. Linocut printing developed in the early 20th century and involves the artist cutting out a design on a sheet of linoleum. The relief area is then inked and the image transferred to paper.  Artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were famous exponents of this method of printing.

The work is now on display in the foyer just inside the door of the Berkeley Library. Our opening hours change this month due to the start of the new academic year, so please check the library webpage for access.

Improvements in the west
Improvements in the west
Patrons of the GAA
Patrons of the GAA