The increasingly inventive ways in which scholars have interrogated the vast range of source material relating to the 1916 Easter Rising is evident in two recent contributions to the 1916 literature that focus specifically on ‘material culture’: objects, images, and spaces created during or inspired by the Rising.
Darragh Gannon’s Proclaiming a republic, with contributions by Sandra Heise, Brenda Malone, and Pádraig Clancy, is inspired by the National Museum of Ireland’s wonderful exhibition of the same name, drawing largely from the museum’s ‘Easter Week collection’ of over 15,000 items. The book is well researched, fluidly written, and lavishly illustrated in full colour. Gannon’s thoughtful and wide-ranging narrative of events before, during, and after the outbreak of rebellion at Easter 1916 is interspersed throughout with contemporary photographs, documents, objects, and ephemera. An opening chapter on the proclamation highlights the limited immediate impact of the document (in stark contrast to its mass, though often misunderstood, appeal now). Gannon also suggests that it might well be seen as a ‘documentary riposte’ to the Ulster Unionist Council’s own proclamation of 1913 (p. 15). From there, the book traces the politics of nationalism, unionism, labour, and suffrage up to 1916 and offers a pacy narrative of the Rising itself, before turning to the executions (including short pen-pics of the executed leaders), internment, and public responses.
A final chapter examines the memory and commemoration of the Rising, from solemn, ritualistic ceremonies in Arbour Hill under Cumann na nGaedhael (closed to the public), to the often triumphalist celebrations of 1966. The muted commemoration prompted by the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland was in turn replaced with a focus on inclusivity and shared history after 2006. Alongside the broader history of the Rising’s afterlife, Gannon documents the evolution of the National Museum’s 1916 exhibitions. The original exhibition, conceived by veteran Nellie Gifford-Donnelly (and originally opposed by the museum’s director Adolf Mahr on financial and other grounds), opened in 1932 and focused heavily (and largely circumstantially) on the leaders of the Rising. By 1935, following an influx of accessions, British artefacts were also on display, including the proclamation of martial law alongside the proclamation of the Irish republic. Over the following years the chronological scope expanded and while arms and armaments remained prominent, greater space was given to personal items reflecting the ordinary lives of the Rising’s key figures. A self-conscious acknowledgment of the ways in which 1916 was represented through commemoration itself in the 2006 exhibition allowed Art Ó Murnaghan’s beautiful Leabhar na hAiséirighe (The book of the Resurrection), created between 1924 and 1951, to take an important place. This brilliant piece of art, and its back story, is another reminder of the value of displaying and studying objects inspired by the Rising and those intended to shape its narratives.
Many of the items reproduced and discussed in Proclaiming a republic also appear in Making 1916, which its editors describe as the ‘first book-length treatment’ of the ways in which ‘objects, images and spaces operated in relation to the Rising and its by-now long aftermath’ (p. 2). Based on a 2013 conference, the book is divided into four sections – ‘The fabric of the Rising’; ‘The affective bonds of the Rising’; ‘Revivalism and the Rising’; and ‘Remembering the Rising’ – with twenty-two essays in total (seventeen short, five longer).
The collection combines an impressive range of disciplines, case-studies, and methodologies. Contributors draw new insights into the nature and legacies of the Rising from objects (such as the Irish tricolour), documents (including the proclamation, a ‘half-proclamation’, and the infamous ‘Castle document’), postcards, photographs, ‘national’ dress, Lavery’s painting of Roger Casement’s trial, newsreels, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards’ historical pageant The ford of the hurdles, and even museums themselves (Joye and Malone’s excellent essay on the National Museum’s 1916 exhibition). Franc Myles’s chapter on the retreat from the General Post Office to Moore Street demonstrates the value of the physical landscape as a source, a point reemphasised by Damien Shiels and something twentieth-century Irish history has remained slow to embrace.
Brian Crowley’s study of Pearse’s side-profile, carefully curated during his lifetime, highlights the cult of relic that emerged in the following decades – it was used in 1965 as a feature on the mosaic of the risen Christ in the new cathedral in Galway – reflecting and explaining Pearse’s place at the peak of the 1916 hierarchy (reinforced in the 1930s, as Elaine Sisson notes, by plays like The singer and Easter 1916). It has also, Crowley argues, contributed to a reductive perception of Pearse, lacking nuance and reflecting a failure to conceive of him as a man of flesh and blood. Indeed, the personal items found in the National Museum’s collection and in Proclaiming a republic – razors, wristwatches, cigarette cases – remind us of ordinary lives lived, while last letters point to lives cut short.
In his contribution, Jack Elliott argues that a study of material culture allows for an exploration of the ways in which individuals began to interact with and shape narratives about the Rising – and attempt to understand them – in the months after its suppression. Importantly, the individual is understood as a consumer of this material (just as likely to have been produced to make a quick shilling as for any political reason), but also sometimes taking the time to modify, adapt, and create to match their own ideas or agendas. This is seen in the creation of lockets, badges, and scapulars using newspaper clippings of images of the Rising’s leaders, many whom were not widely known beforehand. It is also evident in the scrapbooks of Frank Martin and Elsie Mahaffy. Both collected ephemera and created scrapbooks as attempts to curate, explain, and understand the Rising, but for very different reasons: Martin was an Irish Volunteer while Mahaffy, daughter of the provost of Trinty College Dublin, was very much opposed to the Rising.
Similarly, Johanna Brück and Lauren McAtackney’s essays on prison craftwork and autograph books respectively show how these objects and their creation allowed prisoners to understand their own experiences. Brück argues that prison craftwork made by post-Rising internees allowed individuals – often imprisoned without trial or a definite release date – to cope with their confinement. Gifts of macramé handbags served to maintain severed or interrupted connections with loved ones (wives, mothers, sisters; most internees were men) and at the same time demonstrate ‘a poignant longing for domesticity’ alongside a sense of continuing involvement in domestic life, exemplified by a set of macramé child’s reins (p.106). Making essentially domestic items for women, Brück argues, reinforced gender roles. At the same time, references to 1916 – implicit and explicit – in McAtackney’s prison autograph books functioned as a means for anti-Treaty women to claim their role as inheritors of the Rising while imprisoned during the Civil War. Kilmainham Gaol itself was also important to these women as a site for its links to the 1916 leaders, their imprisonment, and execution. Lisa Godson’s chapter documents state ceremonies at another site, Arbour Hill, beginning with Cumann na nGaedhael’s ‘quasi-religious private ceremony’, where the ‘pro-Treaty side derived their moral and military authority from the martyrs of 1916’ (p. 251). When Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932, the scope and scale of the ceremony was practically and symbolically enlarged, but again for reasons inextricable from contemporary politics.
In contrast, Elizabeth Crooke’s essay on 1916 artefacts in museums in Northern Ireland is ‘a story of absence’ (p. 194), but one that offers an important counterpoint to a largely ‘southern’ focus. The contested legacy of the Rising, and the outbreak of conflict in the late 1960s, encouraged museums and curators there to avoid the Rising altogether, a trait that has started to be reversed in recent years. It has been replaced with a desire to gather community knowledge and an emphasis on ‘shared history’ in a post-conflict environment.
As the editors intend, this volume should encourage a conversation that will no doubt be supplemented by studies reflecting on the material culture of the centenary year in 2016. Indeed, as Gannon suggests in concluding his book, we might perhaps spend more time thinking ‘outside the archival box’ (p. 273).
