Irish Jesuit Archives

The Irish Jesuit Archives will participate in the Explore Your Archive campaign (14-20 November 2015) by blogging and tweeting next week. There will be a new document or photograph featured each day, with further mentions on Twitter and Facebook.

Check out www.learnaboutarchives.ie for details of Irish events and the Irish Jesuit Archives storybox.  

As a preview, a document from a hundred years today, refugees in Ireland.

Recently, I visited Emo Court, county Laois. My interest in Emo relates to the papers the Irish Jesuit Archives holds on the Jesuit ownership of the house (1930-1969). Now in the hands of the Office of Public Works, the history of Emo dates back to the Earls of Portarlington in the eighteenth century. The first earl, John Dawson, commissioned the building of Emo Court in 1790; it is one of only a few private houses designed by the architect James Gandon.

Rear of Emo Court, October 2015

The Portarlington’s sold Emo in 1920 to the Land Commission and the Jesuits purchased the property in 1930, to be used as a novitiate (house of first formation). The Jesuits found Emo in a dilapidated state, with grass growing up through the floorboards. They made significant structural changes in order for it to function as a novitiate rather than as a family home. Many items were removed however they were stored in the basement (fireplace wrapped in blankets).

In 1969, the Jesuits sold Emo to Major Cholmeley Dering Cholmeley-Harrison. He restored the house, sparing no expense, and donated it to the Irish State in 1995.

My visit included a walk around the gardens of Emo and a tour of the house by accommodating OPW staff. I was fortunate to be in the company of Jesuits who were novices there; the earliest was a novice in 1946. The chats with Jesuits varied on topics like the breeding of birds, swimming in the lake, the growing of peaches by Jesuit brothers in the glasshouse, fusion (where novices and ordained Jesuits mixed) and a quarter of charity (a not very charitable form of fault finding).

Further Reading:

Fr Anthony Symondson SJ, ‘A Miraculous Survival: Emo Court’, Irish Arts Review (1996)

Benedict Kiely’s There was an Ancient House, Methusen and Co Ltd, London (1955).

Booklet on Emo Court - Laois education Centre.
www.laoisedcentre.ie/Dreamemo/Projectwork/!Booklet%20A4_pages.pdf

Today, 12 October, marks the centenary of the death of Fr John Gwynn SJ, the first Irish Jesuit chaplain to die in the First World War.

John was born at Youghal, county Cork in 1866 and moved to Galway when a child, as his father, a barrack sergeant, was stationed there. These extracts are taken from an article by Fr Paul Andrews SJ in Irish Jesuit Chaplains in the First World War, Messenger Publications, (2014):

‘At first blush John Gwynn was your standard edifying story. A man of imposing stature, good looks and attractive personality, he followed his brother William into the Jesuits, did well in his studies, and worked in schools (Crescent and Mungret College, Limerick) and in the nascent University College Dublin from 1903 till 1914. After pleading, urgently, to be sent as a chaplain to the Irish Guards, he at last got his way and joined up in November 1914. Eleven months later, aged 49, he was killed by a German shell. The tributes paid after his death showed that he was an extraordinarily devoted and effective chaplain, loved and respected by his comrades in the Irish Guards. His close friend John Bithrey, a former Jesuit scholastic, wrote a moving memoir of John: A great Irish Chaplain (1951). Rudyard Kipling, whose son was killed in France as a soldier in the Irish Guards, wrote a powerful tribute to John, which Bithrey quotes in an Appendix.

But the correspondence by and about John show a darker side. His body did not give him a smooth ride. In 1906 he told the Father Provincial ‘Cold water is the only thing that agrees with me, and the least thing upsets me, so much so that at times I can scarcely eat anything.’

In July 1914 he writes from Mungret: ‘My superiors do not know or guess the broken state I am in, the utter broken state I am in; twelve months living in terror and hope deferred, and of sleepless nights, have left me a wreck. The other day I sat and I trembled from head to foot.’

John Gwynn’s life presents some startling contrasts. Although at the beginning of the war he was, in Bithrey’s words, little better than a physical wreck, he was rapidly thrust into the worst fighting of the winter, and reflected: ‘I smile when I remember what I heard people in Ireland say before I left, that Chaplains don’t run any risks. Since Christmas Eve I have not been out of shell and rifle fire night, noon or morning.’ The hideous war in Flanders brought out qualities in John – and no doubt in many others – that had effectively lain hidden in the routines of a Jesuit school. In a remarkable way he came alive when faced with the inhuman butchery of the war. In Mungret he was ineffectual and an object of pity. In France he was respected and loved. He had, for however brief a period, found his vocation.’

Yesterday, in honour of Fr Gwynn’s work with the Irish Guards, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton celebrated Mass at the Sacred Heart Church, Caterham, Surrey, England where the Irish Guards have erected a tablet in Fr Gwynn’s memory.

Dublin City Library & Archive in partnership with the Irish Jesuit Archives have organised a series of lunch-time lectures (1.10-1.50 p.m) to take place every Tuesday in October, on the topic of The Irish Colleges on the Continent. The venue is the Council Chamber, City Hall, Dame Street, Dublin 2, Admission free: booking not required.

The first talk occurs on Tuesday, 6th October and is by Jesuit, Dr Thomas J. Morrissey on  ‘The Irish Student Diaspora in the 16th Century, James Archer S.J, and the Early Years of the Irish College Salamanca’.

Last Monday at Cabra Library, I spoke at an event organised by the Dublin Festival of History on Fr Michael Morrison SJ and the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

I was honoured that Bill Morrison, nephew of Fr Michael, and Tomi Reichental, survivor of Bergen Belsen, both attended and spoke briefly.

Morrison, born in Kerry but reared in Limerick, was among the first to enter Bergen Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. The talk focused on the letters that Morrison sent back to his Jesuit provincial in Dublin describing the horror of what he encountered. (Letter here). I also used some photographs taken at Bergen Belsen (here) and audio of Richard Dimbleby’s report from the camp on the BBC (here).

The letter written by Morrison back to Dublin on 11 May 1945 was particularly difficult to read.

‘…This place has been receiving quite a lot of publicity of late…I have seen some of the pictures reproduced in the papers but they fall very short of giving a proper idea of the horror of this place…people crawling on their hands and knees because they have not got the strength to walk, or see them drag themselves along until they fell in the gutters to remain there, was harrowing…Many of the bodies showed signs of cannibalism, with their livers removed. It is easy to understand when you consider the ration was half a litre of turnip soup and 120 grams of bread a fortnight…Some of the huts had three tier bunks with a narrow passage down the middle.  In all bunks there were at least two and sometimes three people and it was not uncommon to find one or two of them dead.  In the passage in some of the huts one had to be careful where one put one’s foot to avoid stepping on dead bodies…The work here has been physically the most revolting that I have been called to do but it has also been the most consoling.  Even if I had done no other work since I joined up I consider my four years in the army were worthwhile’.

I also talked briefly about archives and cataloguing, particularly in relation to the captioning of a photograph from Bergen Belsen. The photograph below, according to the Imperial War Museum depicts two British Army chaplains, Rev Leslie H Hardman, Senior Jewish Chaplain to the 2nd Army, and the Roman Catholic Padre Father M C Morrison, conducting a service over one of the mass graves before it is filled in.

However, the man on the right is not Hardman. How do we know? Fr Morrison tells his provincial in a letter relating to the photograph which appeared in the Universe magazine on 4 May 1945 (the subtitle, that he was with the Jewish chaplain, Rev. Leslie Hardman from Leeds). ‘In point of fact the man with me is a Polish Priest who was a prisoner here. His name is Rev. Stanislaus Kadizolka of the parish of Raba Wyzna near Cracow’. He suggested to the provincial that he do something to correct the mistake.

The mistake was never corrected, it still appears on the IWM website and was used as one of the photographs in the newspaper obituaries for Leslie Hardman in 2008.

On Monday, 28 September 2015, as part of the Dublin Festival of History, I will be speaking at Cabra Library about an Irish Jesuit, Michael Morrison and the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.

Michael Morrison (1908-1974), born in Kerry but reared in Limerick, volunteered to be a chaplain in 1941. He was one of the first chaplains who entered Bergen Belsen and the series of letters that Morrison sent back to Dublin describe the horror that he witnessed. In one letter he writes “The work has been physically the most revolting that I have been called on to do, but it has also been the most consoling.”

http://dublinfestivalofhistory.ie/event/fr-michael-morrison-sj-and-the-liberation-of-bergen-belsen-2/

The Irish Jesuit Archives is participating in this year’s National Heritage Week. A walking tour entitled Walking with documents will focus on sites of Jesuit history and interest in the south inner city area of Dublin. Starting on St. Stephen’s Green, the tour will stop at Newman House, St. Kevin’s Park, Hatch Street and Lower Leeson Street. 

Walking with documents will make use of copies of photographs and letters held at the Irish Jesuit Archives and it is hoped that participants will gain a greater understanding of the history of the Jesuits in Dublin and of archives.

See further event details here

The theme which dominates the summer issue of Studies is the First World War.

The archives element to the issue is based on a talk I gave at the Jesuit Bicentenary conference (‘Under the Influence’) in September 2014, and it covers a number of other Irish Jesuit chaplains in the Great War whose tales were not told in the book I edited on this subject (Irish Jesuit Chaplains in the First World War, Messenger Publications, 2014).

The majority of Jesuits who volunteered to serve were accepted but some were refused due to illness, age or suitability. Others were ‘volunteered’ by the Provincial. The chaplains ‘saw themselves as making Christ present to men living in constant danger, often in terrible pain and dying’. The Ignatian sense of desolation and consolation is exemplified in the letters of Fr Joseph Wrafter SJ to the Provincial, where he mentions ‘the most terrible scenes I have witnessed in the War’ when serving with the 8th Royal Munster Fusiliers, while on saying on another occasion ‘I am delighted to be out here and love the life. It is the best work I ever had.’

The letters, telegrams and photographs sent back by the chaplains to the Irish Provincial, give a first-hand account of the life and experiences of those who served. They tell of misunderstandings, gossip, death and of frustration.

Jesuit chaplains who served in the First World War did not regard themselves as ‘in any sense natural heroes, and their apostolates and lives were, for the most part, humdrum and ordinary. In the circumstances of war, some were transformed into truly exceptional men’. For others who survived the conflict, they never recovered from their wartime experiences. Studies website

A conference entitled ‘Ireland’s Others: The 21st Australasian Irish Studies Conference’ takes place at Maynooth University from the 18-20th of June 2015.

The Irish Jesuit Archives is giving a paper on Saturday, 20th June on the archives of the Irish Jesuit Mission to Australia, 1865-1931.

One hundred and fifty years ago, two Irish Jesuits arrived in Melbourne, Australia at the invitation of James Alipius Goold, Bishop of Melbourne. For the next hundred years, Irish Jesuits worked as missionaries, educators, writers, chaplains, theologians, scientists, pastors and directors of retreats, mainly in the urban communities of eastern Australia. This paper will seek to explore the work of this mission from 1865 until the creation of Australia as a Vice-Province in 1931, as told through the archival prism of the documents and photographs held at the Irish Jesuit Archives.

Flickr images

On 9th May 2015, the AGM of the Association for Church Archives of Ireland occurred. The theme of the day focused on policies and my talk was on ‘Policies in the Irish Jesuit Archives: the proof is in the implementation’. I gave some background to the development of the Jesuit archives service and to the history of Jesuit record-keeping. I then focused on the written policies at the archives which include: Contact and Access, Rule for researchers, Donation, Use, Photograph and Scanning, Copyright, Development and Disaster Plan. Examples of how they were used were given.

The above shows some of the unwritten policies - in fact they are implemented within ways of working or in Jesuit speak,  ‘Our way of Proceeding’. The sources for Jesuit policies include:

• Practica Queadam (1997, revised 2015), (Formula scribendi)
• A Guide to Jesuit Archives (1997, revised 2015)
• ‘Scriptis Tradere et Fideliter Conservare’: Archives as “places of memory” within the Society of Jesus (Rome, 2003)
• Jesuit Curia Archives, Rome and other Jesuit archives

Other policies that I have looked at:

Finally, I mentioned some hints to keep in mind when writing policies.

• Make language clear and concise
  
• Understand that the researcher/user may not be familiar with terminology used
• Share policies
• No point writing a policy if you cannot implement it
• Data Protection 

The four websites below can help in sourcing information regarding Irishmen and woman who served with the Australian Forces in the First World War. They have helped me enormously in researching the six Jesuits who served with the Australian Forces:

National Archives of Australia -  the original B2544 series give you the digital copy of official service records. 

Discovering Anzacs - has official records of those who served, along with stories and search facilities (although the google map is a bit hit and miss, Cookstown, Tyrone is referenced as Cookstown, Dublin).

Australian War Memorial  - gives you photographs, film and articles.

Irish Anzacs database -  aims to identify all Irish-born enlistments in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War.

Group portrait of officers of the 7th Battalion on the Aegean island of Lemnos, 25 December 1915. These officers were still with the Battalion on Christmas Day 1917. The two on each end of the front row, and the two in the middle of the back row, are wearing padded winter Service Dress caps. Identified left to right (back row): Captain (Capt) Charles Aloysius Denehy; Reverend Joseph Hearn, Chaplain 3rd Class; Lieutenant (Lt) Smith; possibly Lt Wilfred Ledlie Heron. Front row: Lt Geoffrey Gordon McCrae (later killed in action on 19 July 1916) ; Capt Alfred Jackson; Capt Herbert Thomas Christoph Layh.

https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C01190/

The National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks has an exhibition of photographs taken by Andrew Horne, a doctor who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, of Gallipoli. He was also profiled on last night on RTE’s Gallipoli - Ireland’s Forgotten Heroes

The Irish Times report of the exhibition: Rare photographs of Gallipoli in Collins Barracks exhibition

The Medical Independent has an excellent article on Andrew Horne entitled: Care and casualties in WWI

From an archives perceptive - Andrew Horne entered Belvedere College in 1901-2, the same year as Joseph Plunkett. Horne’s classmates would include Arthur Cox and Reginald Clery (killed in the Easter Rising 1916 at Northumberland Road). 

Tennis at Belvedere College, 1908

At Belvedere College, he was taught by Mr Frank Browne SJ (not yet ordained, later to become known as the Titanic photographer) and would have taken part in Browne’s Camera Club at the college. This club had outings and Saturday lectures, given by Mr Ebbs, Secretary of the Dublin Photographic Club, ‘whom Mr. Lafayette kindly consented to send to the college’. Lectures were given on the components parts of the camera, on lenses, keeping things tidy, and how to produce a complete photgraph In 1915, the 24 year-old Horne sent photographs back to Belvedere College of Gallipoli. Four of his fellow Belvederians would die at Gallipoli in 1915; Gerald Plunkett (aged 27), William McGarry (aged 20), JV Dunn (aged 23) and Kevin O’ Duffy (aged 20).

17th Stationary Hospital, with Achi Baba in the distance. Taken by Dr Andrew Horne.

Taken by Dr Andrew Horne.

On Saturday 25 April, the annual dawn Anzac commemoration will take place at Grangegorman Military Cemetery, Dublin. It is the centenary of the failed Anzac engagement at Gallipoli. Six Jesuits, five of them Irish-born, served with the Australian Imperial Forces in the First World War. Frs Joseph Hearn of Mayo and Michael Bergin of Tipperary both served at Gallipoli. Many past pupils of Jesuit schools in Limerick, Galway, Kildare and Dublin served at Gallipoli with the Australian and British forces. Belvederians William McGarry (Royal Dublin Fusiliers) and Kevin O’ Duffy (Royal Munster Fusiliers) were twenty-years old when killed at Sulva Bay. Clongownians John Dunn and Micheal Fitzgibbon both were killed on 15 August 1915. Mungret College past pupils John Brazil and Robert Cussen both from Limerick were killed serving with the Royal Munster Fusiliers.

Fr Bergin describes Gallipoli in 1915. ‘There are times here when you would think this was the most peaceful corner of the earth - peaceful sea, peaceful men, peaceful place; then, any minute the scene may change - bullets whistling, shells bursting. One never knows. It is not always when fighting that the men are killed - some are caught in their dug-outs, some carrying water. We know not the day or the hour. One gets callous to the sight of death. You pass a dead man as you’d pass a piece of wood. And when a high explosive catches a man, you do see wounds’.

Mass and Holy Communion at Walker’s Ridge, Anzac, 1915 by Father O’ Connor, C.F., and the 6TH Leinsters.

I have written about the Jesuit chaplains who served with the Australian forces and met with their relatives. Last year, I accompanied Irish Jesuits to visit Fr Bergin’s grave in Belgium. However,  reading Michael Mullins’ article on Eureka Street entitled, The last Anzac’s bullshit detector, has made me assess my scruples. Working at the Irish Jesuit Archives, I am a biased archivist but, my gut feeling is to question the narratives regarding war commemoration and especially Anzackery: ‘the destructive and even abusive effects of the jingoism associated with Anzac Day’. Last September, while waiting in queue to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate, Ypres, I chatted to two schoolchildren from a rural town in New South Wales, Australia. They travelled over with a parent, to commemorate the men of their town who died in the First World War. So, in that spirit, I will go to Grangegorman and mourn the dead, not to celebrate ‘the nation…born [apparently] on the cliffs of Gallipoli’.

On the afternoon of Thursday, 30 April 2015, I will be speaking at a workshop organised as part of UCD Decade of Centenaries, entitled ‘Fevered archivists - outreach strategies and the documentation of archival activity in the decade of centenaries’.

Irish Jesuit Documents in Rome: Part 17 (1 April 2015)                           

Not giving the Jesuit martyr Edmund Daniel (O'Donnell) a bad name

I just listed six really interesting letters from Limerick dated 1566, written by English Jesuit William Good who had joined nuncio David Wolfe SJ – Ireland’s first Jesuit – in Limerick in 1565. Good set up the first Jesuit school in Ireland, and each of his letters mentions the young Limerick man Edmund Daniel, a relative of Wolfe’s, and a Jesuit aspiring to the priesthood. (His real surname may have been O'Donnell or McDonnell.) Wolfe described him to be of timid temperament, and we also know he was not of good health. But without him, Good could not have run the schools in Limerick, Kilmallock and later Clonmel and Youghal which they both set up. Apart from teaching children Latin and grammar, Daniel also nursed Good back to health when he fell ill after the Limerick school was sacked and looted in the late autumn of 1565.

However, one letter is different, warning anybody who reads it strongly against Daniel. Dated ‘Holy Week 1566’, it is from Kilmallock, and in Good’s hand.

“Dearest Fathers and Brothers in the Lord,

Beware, as Paul said [Philippians 3:2] of Edmund Daniel, an irregular brother who is going we don’t know where, but especially if he should come to your Colleges and demands to be received as a brother. Understand that he came to you from our district in a bad spirit, having been disowned by us. We were impelled to do so by his  perverse stubbornness, because he was working under the vice of open drunkenness, disdained to commit to the penitence brought on himself for it, and moreover raised a clamour and threats against us. Having warned you in this way (and we do so in great sadness and openly), we ask you that you try well to persuade [him] to put down his plumes and pursue humility and patience.

We also ask you that you pray God for us pitiable men left in this most pitiable country Ireland, that we serve him in the true spirit and sincerely strive for every perfection in the Lord, [and] that God would free us and make us safe from these who are more tigers than men. Farewell.”

Good’s letter dated Holy Week 1566, Kilmallock (ARSI Anglia 41 f.3r)

Whatever happened, Daniel was received back; the next letter of June merely names him and then details their work. You might say that like a bad journalist I picked this one item for sensational value, but it seems to me it just adds to the picture of shared poverty, worry, sometimes misery, and an inability to do much for the populace that arises from Good’s letters.

By 1568, Good and Daniel were in Youghal, and then the mission was recalled: Wolfe had lost his support and was imprisoned, and the Desmond rebellion and persecutions combined to make it too dangerous. About Daniel, the Belgian Provincial wrote in 1570 that for him to stay in the order, he would have to leave Ireland: it was not right for a Jesuit scholastic to live with his relatives, while the only professed Jesuit in the country was in prison. 

Daniel left the country in 1571 and over the following year (with or without permission) travelled the Iberian peninsula collecting ransom for Wolfe: when he returned to Ireland in 1572 he also doubled as a messenger to the insurgent leader James FitzMaurice FitzGerald. With incriminating documents on his person, he was arrested in Limerick, taken to Cork 'just as if he were a thief or noted evildoer’ (so John Howlin, Perbreve compendium, 1590), and after being court-marshalled by the President of Munster, John Perrot, he was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, maybe on 25 October 1572 (so Fr.Wolfe in 1574). Fitzmaurice wrote to the Jesuit Superior General in 1576, 'one of your brothers was cruelly killed because of me’. He may have died because of Fitzmaurice, but he died for Wolfe, and for his faith.

Joanes’s map of Kilmallock, c.1600 (TCD), from the Kilmallock Town Walls Conservation and Management Plan (2009)

The most comprehensive collection of sources about Daniel is here: Diocese of Dublin, Cause for the Beatification and Canonisation of the Servants of God Richard Creagh archbishop, who died in England, and companions who died in Ireland in defence of the Catholic faith 1572–1655 (1 vol. Rome, 1998).

Vera Orschel (archivist&editor)