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      FIGURE 1.1

      Harry Clarke Diary 1919. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, MS 39, 202 (B)(2).

      One hundred years later, computer programs and web-based interfaces allow Ireland’s Memorial Records to be searched online for names, regiments, and dates of death. The ease of international access to the data has meant that the artistic achievement of Ireland’s Memorial Records has been lost. The artwork has been removed from the online search capability; the illustrations are considered secondary to the text, mere decoration. What if we were to set aside the text for a time and consider only the borders? What if Ireland’s Memorial Records were considered not a flawed collection of names, but a superior realization of memorial art?

Maunsel and Roberts were known for printing nationalist literature including J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1907) and the Collected Works of Padraic [Padraig] H. Pearse (1917). Thus, they were a suitable publisher for printing the roll of the Irish dead. Given the choice of publisher and artist it appears as though Clarke’s illustrations and George Roberts’s visual design were symbolic acts of repatriation of the Irish soldiers, removing them from Britain’s army into a realm of purely Irish aesthetics. Each volume of Ireland’s Memorial Records measures twelve inches by ten inches. Following the decorative title page, eight images are repeated throughout the volumes, in recto and verso (reversed) – including soldiers in silhouette, ruined houses, graves, trenches, the Gallipoli Peninsula, cavalry, airplanes, tanks, bursting shells and searchlights. Sets were delivered to libraries and cathedrals in Ireland, England, Canada, Australia, and the United States. A very fine set was presented to King George V on 23 July 1924 and, also at that time, a set was conveyed to the Vatican.3

Who was Harry Clarke? He is known as a talented and visionary stained-glass artist. He was born in Dublin, educated at Belvedere College, and left school at age 14 to enter into a series of apprenticeships. While he began to refine and perfect his stained-glass technique through plating and aciding the glass, he also was working on pen and ink illustration. In 1913, Clarke received the commission to illustrate the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen for George Harrap & Co., London and he was occupied with his illustrations and travels on the continent throughout 1914. When England declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Clarke did not enlist. From 1914 onward, he was dedicated to a commission to complete eleven stained-glass windows at the Honan Chapel in Cork, which are now considered among his masterpieces.4

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir John French, instigated the idea for a national war memorial on 17 July 1919, the day prior to the Peace Day celebrations.5 The year marks the beginning of a great age of war memorials in Britain and the Commonwealth, with public and private monuments raised to commemorate over one million British troops dead or missing in the war. The pressing desire for post-war remembrance fostered two exhibitions held in London in 1919 by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy War Memorials Committee. Clarke’s domestic stained-glass panel ‘Gideon’ was among the new works exhibited at the V&A exhibit that opened in July 1919.6 In Ireland, a core group that would become the sustaining subcommittee for Irish memorials came together at the 1919 meeting, including in particular, Andrew Jameson (director of the whiskey distillery) and Clarke’s patron, the former MP Laurence Waldron.7

This meeting in July 1919 resulted in two resolutions that were ‘unanimously passed’: first, ‘to erect in Dublin a permanent Memorial to the Irish Officers and men of His Majesty’s Forces who fell in the Great War’; and to prepare ‘parchment rolls’ upon which ‘should be recorded the names of Irish Officers and men of all services who had fallen in the war’.8 At this point in 1919, from the first meeting of a group of interested and, it appears, mostly loyalist parties, Ireland’s Memorial Records were joined with a permanent memorial structure to house them, which we know today as the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. Although Ireland’s Memorial Records were completed in 1923, the memorial would not be complete until 1938, the eve of Britain’s entry into the Second World War. Consequently, the memorial was not officially opened until 1988.9

      Given an absence of historical records, it is difficult to answer with any certainty why Harry Clarke was chosen as the illustrator or Maunsel as the publisher. Extant historical documents are silent on the official decisions and parlour conversations that might shed light on the making of the books. It is likely that his friendship with Waldron led to the commission, for Waldron was present at the initial meeting at the Viceregal Lodge. Descriptive, illustrative announcements of their publication appeared in key publications in the early 1920s, the books were exhibited to the public, and copies were distributed to libraries. However, due to the political climate in Ireland that challenged any affiliation with the crown and the absence of a suitable memorial space for display, Ireland’s Memorial Records slipped into a long period of obscurity.

      War Memorials in Ireland

      On 4 August 1914, the date that England declared war on Germany, the Irish people were governed by Great Britain. Four years later, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Ireland was on the brink of a war to secure independence from England. The intervening four years were momentous, including the granting and subsequent suspension of the Government of Ireland Act in 1914, the 1915 military disaster at Suvla Bay, the 1916 rebellion in Dublin raised by the Irish Volunteers, and the 1916 devastation of the Battle of the Somme. By the conclusion of the First World War, Irish soldiers returned to a country divided, their status as British military veterans complicating their relationship with the emerging Irish Free State.

The historian Fergus D’Arcy opens his survey of war memorials in Ireland by noting that the service of Irish soldiers to the First World War was for many years ‘a story woefully neglected and willfully forgotten’.10 This sentiment has been echoed by the historian John Horne, who has argued that ‘from the Second World War the memory of the Great War was increasingly denied in the public life and self-understanding of independent Ireland’.11 While many recent histories have rectified the denial and neglect, the question of remembering and commemorating the Irish dead of the First World War continues to provoke controversy.

      What role do Ireland’s Memorial Records play in remembrance? The intent of books of remembrance is to offer a tangible object for reflection. Not only do they provide evidence of the service record of the dead, but also they elevate the names to a semi-sacred status of sacrifice for the nation. Paired with a memorial space, such as a chapel within a cathedral or a dedicated war memorial, rolls of remembrance offer powerful connections between the individual and the nation. In several major Anglican cathedrals in England, such as Canterbury, St Paul’s, and Manchester, services of remembrance surrounding the regimental rolls of the dead continue to take place daily, weekly, or monthly. These rituals of ‘turning of the pages’, connect the living, the dead, the church, and the state. Ireland’s Memorial Records are displayed within Church of Ireland cathedrals, and similar page-turning rituals were intended initially to take place in Ireland.

Abstracted

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