Illuminated addresses, national identity and Irish sport, 1880–1901

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the cultural significance of illuminated sporting addresses in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Illuminated addresses were used in civic society as a means of commemoration, celebrating retirement and relocation for instance, and they were also physical expressions of public sporting events in Ireland. Illuminated addressees are documents which provide an insight into the cultural histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish sport. This essay pays particular attention to illuminated addresses sponsored by members of the Gaelic Athletic Association and also considers the significance of a late 1890s example which was funded by supporters of the Irish horse-racing which sheds light on the sub-culture of the Irish turf. Illuminated addresses are meaningful documents and this essay recovers, for the first time, some of their hidden history.

KEYWORDS:

• Illuminated addresses
• Irish sports
• Gaelic Athletic Association
• Irish arts and crafts
• cultural identity
• bookmaking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Illuminated addresses pass from the public realm into the hands of an individual, and accessing these objects a hundred years later and more can prove challenging. Few survive in public repositories.

2. McNamara, “Illuminated Address to Charles Stuart Parnell,” 32–33. This address, dated 1880, was presented to Parnell to mark the occasion of his address to the United States House of Representatives in February 1880 and is now held at the National Library of Ireland. Parnell had been sent by the Land League to California to fundraise for relief for the west of Ireland in December 1879 and secured the opportunity to speak to United States Congress in February of the following year.

3. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, 9.

4. “The Irish Deputation. Addresses Presented”, Cork Examiner, November 27, 1900, 6.

5. As, for instance, in an occasion described in the Cork Examiner of March 21, 1910, in which a Mr Daly, banker and sportsman (Hon. Secretary of the Cork Coursing Club) was rewarded for years of service:

PRESENTATION TO A BANK OFFICIAL. O’Meara’s Hotel, Nenagh, was the scene of an enjoyable function at the occasion of the presentation to Mr W. R. Daly, for many years accountant at the Munster and Leinster Bank, and who recently has been promoted to Bandon … The presentation consisted of an illuminated address, a splendid engraved cigarette case purchased at Mr Tobin’s jewelry establishment, and a purse of sovereigns from the members of the Coursing Club and the public.

6. Notably available from the illuminated divisions of Irish printers and newspapers which were established by the turn of the century. For instance, the northern printers W. and G. Baird, a company which survives to this day, advertised “Illuminated Addresses” in the Larne Times on November 23, 1907:

A high degree of artistic skill is required to produce an illuminated address that will reflect credit on those responsible for it. Our Illuminating Work increases substantially year on year. This is because our artists are highly skilled, because they exercise their ingenuity and do not slavishly copy old models. We are always striving to turn out better work than we ever turned out before, and we succeed.  That is why our Addresses give satisfaction – invariably. W. & G. Baird, Royal Avenue, Belfast.

The Irish Times had an illuminating division by 1900 (see number for 20 October 1900, 1) and the Derry Times was advertising its own “Celtic Illumination” department in the 1920s (see issue for December 31 1923, 4).

7. South Wales Daily News, June 6, 1887, 6.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. The address continues thus: “Our feelings in this respect are, we fully believe, honestly reciprocated by the bulk of our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen. We look upon the granting of a liberal measure of Home Rule as a measure which will give to Irishmen in their own Parliament the management of all matters purely Irish as distinguished from matters of an Imperial nature – as a step necessarily precedent to any marked improvement in the industries, manufactures, and trade of the country” (ibid.).

11. Ibid.

12. Dublin Weekly Nation, June 11, 1887, 1.

13. For the GAA and masculinity, see Patrick F. McDevitt, “May the Best Man Win,” 14–36.

14. Mrs John James was a Roman Catholic whose brother was a well-known priest in Morpeth, Northumberland and in Liverpool. Both died in 1906 (see “A Double Sorrow. Sister and Brother Buried”, Irish Independent, May 21, 1906, 6: “Mr James has received innumerable telegrams of sympathy with him in his double bereavement”).

15. Not the Merrion Hall on Merrion Street Lower which was the Dublin home of the open branch of the Plymouth Brethren.

16. The British Turf and the Men who have Made It, 256.

17. RAIDS ON ALLEGED DUBLIN BETTING-HOUSES.

B. Division made a raid upon an alleged betting-house, No. 47, Fleet Street, and arrested John James, who described himself as a commission agent, but is described by the police as a ‘betting man’, and two clerks named, James Booker and Charles Byrne … Police made another raid on an alleged betting-house, at 3, Price’s Lane, and arrested Samuel Bryce, stated to be the proprietor, and six men who were found on the premises. … The prisoners were subsequently brought up at the Police Court. Bryce was charged with keeping a betting-house, and was fined £35, or three months' imprisonment. The others were discharged. (Freeman’s Journal, April 20 1890, 6).

18. Freeman’s Journal, May 3, 1890, 7.

19. See O’Callaghan, “Bookmakers, Betting Offices and the Business of Gambling”: “The Betting Act 1926 revolutionised the business of bookmaking in Ireland. Up until to this point bets could only legally be placed with bookmakers on horseracing courses, or on credit over the telephone and by telegram through commission agents. The hitherto illegal activity of cash betting … would now be transacted in state-regulated offices operated by licensed bookmakers” (208).

20. Irish Times, 7 August 1890, 3. The same column features complementary advertisements by bookies James Plant and William Kearney:

I AM HERE JEM PLANT will be standing in all Rings in Ireland. [ADVT]. SO AM I. SO AM I. WILLIAM KEARNEY all the way from the West, with a Connemara chair to let – take a rest.  Good prices for Galway; prompt settlement; will also be represented outside the Ring [ADVT].

21. See, for instance, Dundalk Examiner and Louth Advertiser, 5 November 1904; Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 11 July 1901.

22. Freeman’s Journal, July 3, 1893, 4.

23. Irish Society, March 14, 1891, 210.

24. United Ireland, 28 February 1891, 1. “The remaining twenty-nine pages contain the names of the subscribers, each page surrounded by an illuminated border of varied design and colouring, no two pages being alike”.

25. United Ireland, 28 February 1891, 1.

26. Born in England, “Nick got ‘Irishism’”, writes John Chartres Moloney in The Riddle of the Irish (1927); “he cultivated an academically bloodthirsty hatred of England, and every moment he could spare from medicine [he was a medical student at Trinity] he devoted to the Irish language”, 116.

27. An Claidheamh Soluis, August 31, 1901, 1. The plural of camán is camáin; the contributor appears to have created a neologism, using camán as an English singular word and then adding “s” to signify a plural, as with most English nouns. Brain Griffin points out another oddity here – the newspaper’s use of the word “liothróid”. This word does indeed mean “ball” in Irish, but it is “ball” in a generic sense; it does not describe the spherical object used in hurling – any GAA devotee or fan of hurling would know that hurlers propel a “sliotar” with their hurleys, not a “liothróid”.

28. Caffrey, “Irish Material Culture,” 29.