The image of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic 1916
In a lecture that he gave at Sligo in 1962 the Yeats scholar Edward Malins traced the poet’s own shifting attitude in 1916 to the events that had taken place in Dublin in April, and his attempts during the months that followed to find words for his thoughts. One haunting phrase captures the alteration that took place, both in his own mood and more widely too in Ireland:
‘All changed, changed utterly.’
We now know that the ‘Easter Rising’, which began in confusion and and ended in surrender and apparent failure, coming as it did after so many other fruitless historical ‘rebellions’, proved to be the genesis of the present Irish Republic.
The lecture was published in Dublin in 1965 under the title of Yeats and the Easter Rising, the first of a series of Dolmen Press Yeats Centenary Studies. Edward Malins, a friend of a friend, kindly sent me a copy. It included the illustration of the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ that appears above. When I first saw it, the image immediately struck me as odd, absurd, or even worse. A fake? A forgery? Whatever the answer might be, when I put the question it did not seem to arouse much interest at the time. However it now appears to me that for a number of reasons this may be a good moment for the image of the Proclamation to be examined rather more critically and closely. One of them is the multiplication of different versions on the Internet, the authenticity of some of which appears questionable. And another is that preparations to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, of which the Proclamation is one of the accepted symbols, appear to be already under way.
The incongruous feature of the illustration in the essay by Malins (as many readers of this blog will already have spotted) is that the line IRISH REPUBLIC is set in a well-known typeface that did not exist in 1916. It is Gill Sans Extra Bold, made in 1931 by the English Monotype Corporation as a variant of its Gill Sans of 1927. This is how the line looks, set in the present-day digital version of the type:
And this is how it had appeared in the original Proclamation.
The photograph of the Proclamation used in the printed lecture in 1965 appears to have been supplied to the Dolmen Press by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. The error was all the more unfortunate because the library does possess a genuine original that was presented to it by its former employee, Seán O’Kelly, who had helped to distribute the Proclamation in 1916. It can be seen on the library's web site. (When, as President of Ireland, he gave another copy to Leinster House, the home of the Irish parliament, where it is displayed, he described himself in his speech as bill-poster to the republic.)
Of course this example illustrates yet again, as in the case of the Trieste Leaf, the value of at least some knowledge of the history of printing types to librarians who may need to assess the authenticity and the date of a piece of anonymous printing; but it also suggests that there was at the time, as there still is today, widespread uncertainty about the exact details of the original Proclamation. The date of the ‘Gill Sans’ version, if we may call it that, clearly cannot be earlier than 1931. In fact it seems likely to be considerably later, but at present there seem to be no clues to the identity of its maker nor to its exact date. Nor is it easy to guess why this line, among the others in the heading, all of which were set in types that are more or less battered and not at all modern, should have been replaced with a line in a widely used and familiar style. (There are in fact a few instances of the ‘Gill Sans’ version of the Proclamation in which the line appears artificially ‘distressed' in the manner of fake antique furniture.) A copy that is in the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library of University College, Dublin, measures 38 cm in height, just half the size of the original, with which it is therefore unlikely to be confused. However, as an image of the Proclamation on web pages, where questions of scale are irrelevant, the ‘Gill Sans’ version is currently in disturbingly common use. A detailed account of the Easter Rising by the BBC shows it and, by implication, offers it as an authentic image. And so, no doubt in equally perfect good faith, do many Web sites, based on both sides of the Atlantic, that are dedicated to the Irish republican movement. It is an element in posters that commemorate the seven signatories and the Easter Rising; it appears on t-shirts and mugs; and it is available on a reduced scale, framed, for hanging at home.
In his recent and much-praised account of the Easter Rising Charles Townshend called the making of the Proclamation ‘a minor epic of printing’, and so it was. And he adds this passage on the text of the document:
‘Reproduced countless times, and still serving as the title deed of Irish republicanism, the terms of the proclamation were a kind of distillation of national doctrine, a kind of national poem: lucid, terse, and strangely moving, even to unbelievers.’
The original printed text, produced in circumstances of personal danger to all those involved and achieved only by overcoming formidable material difficulties, is a rare and fragile document of which the evident technical imperfections make one all the more aware of aware how risky the whole enterprise was. For this reason the original version seems to me the only one worth illustrating, and the present exercise is an attempt to find why there are so many enhanced imitations in circulation. The example cited above is only one, albeit one of the worst, of several versions of the Proclamation that do not represent the original printed document. The object of the present enquiry is to identify the different versions, to find where they come from, to see how they differ from the original, and to try to clear up some of the confusion. This is work that is still very much in progress, but it seemed to be worth reporting on. It could not have got as far as it has without some very generous help from others, notably from curators of the collections where copies are to be found.
The proliferation of so many images of the document on the Web is a development that has largely taken place during the last decade. So, too, is another element in the story, namely the greatly increased prices that copies have brought in the sale room, from £26,000 at Mealy’s in Dublin in December 1998 to €360,000 in April 2008 and €220,000 in April 2009 at joint sales by Adam's and Mealy’s. Eleven copies have been put up for sale since 1998 to my knowledge, and ten have sold. (See the summary at the end of this post.) They confirm the prominent place that the document holds among the relics of the Rising, and it should be said that, thanks not least to careful cataloguing by the auctioneers and the fact that their texts and images are published online, there is not the least doubt that every one of the examples that has been sold has been an original copy.
Any attempt to identify the original Proclamation and to distinguish the various images that are derived from it must begin with the records, such as they are, of its making. There have been effectively only two published accounts that attempt to do this (I will give full details and some other references at the end), but an unexpectedly vivid first-hand account has recently been made available and it fills in some of the detail that was lacking.
In 1936, twenty years after the events of 1916, Joseph Bouch published the paper on ‘The Republican Proclamation of Easter Monday, 1916’ that he had given to the Irish Bibliographical Society. In 1986, Michael O’Connor published his own narrative, in which he offered to provide an answer to the question, ‘how would you know a true original’. It is clear that he derived much of his account from Bouch (mostly using Bouch’s own words), but he added further details, including a useful list of copies of the original Proclamation and their locations, and his text was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1999. Bouch had the advantage of having spoken to the original printers, and his text is on the whole a piece of sober and precise bibliographical description. Unfortunately it is all too clear that there were limits to his understanding of the materials and processes used in printing, and this occasionally makes it unwise to rely on his text. O’Connor evidently used other sources too, including some more recent ones, and the additional detail he provides is useful. But one wishes that he could have said what they were and brought some critical judgement to bear on them.
The image of the original Proclamation reproduced here, like some other details of it that appear in this blog, are from a copy that is shown by courtesy of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island, USA (which incidentally houses the typographical library of D. B. Updike). As noted below, it is the only copy of the original Proclamation that is known to exist in a publicly accessible collection in the USA.
The Proclamation was printed during Sunday and Monday, 23 and 24 April 1916, on an old and poorly-maintained Wharfedale cylinder machine in a small printing office that had been set up by James Connolly in the basement at Liberty Hall in Beresford Place, the headquarters building of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union of which he was General Secretary, in order to print his paper The Workers’ Republic.
It may have been a modest office, but it cannot, as O’Connor writes, have measured seven feet by nine, which is an area a little smaller than the overall size of the printing machine alone. The Workers’ Republic was simply but well produced. Indeed the later issues are so well set and printed that one is tempted to wonder if it may not have migrated secretly to another printing office. But if any issues at all came from Liberty Hall, then in addition to space in which to house the machine and to work it, there must have been room for racks for cases of type, some perhaps with brackets above to make frames for the compositors to work at, a proofing device and a stone on which to make up the formes.
Michael Molloy and Liam O’Brien were the compositors and Christopher Brady operated the machine. According to Molloy, who was interviewed in 1966, ‘Connolly told us that what we would print would be a document that would live in history.’ He directed that it should be similar in appearance to an auctioneer’s notice. The paper, bought specially for the job and sufficient to print 2,500 copies, was a poor quality Double Crown, a common size for a poster, nominally 30 × 20 inches (about 76 × 51 cm). The office lacked the large types that were needed for the main text and as Bouch records, making a rare deviation from the cool and impersonal language of bibliography, it was brought in four cases on a hand barrow from the printing office of ‘an Englishman named William Henry West from Capel Street, a most estimable man and a great rebel at heart’.
The larger types are of wood. They are very worn and some are damaged. In original copies, it can be seen that the tail of the letter R of IRISH in the line IRISH REPUBLIC in the heading shows the impact of some square object, and some corners of both R’s are bruised. There is slight damage to the right hand end of the thick and thin rule below the first line of the heading. The E of the word THE in the line TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND had been contrived, as the printers told Bouch, by adding a piece of sealing wax to the foot of an F, since there were no more E’s in the fount.
According to Bouch the metal type used to set the text of the Proclamation was a Two-line Great Primer or about 36 points. It can be identified as the Antique No. 8 of the typefounders Miller & Richard of Edinburgh, a type of the latter part of the 19th century that was still in common use for poster work. There was not enough of it to set even the first three paragraphs of the text so, as Bouch noted, the letter e from a very different fount was used in the last lines of the third paragraph in order to eke out the failing supply of this letter.
He gives the name of this type as Abbey Text, a name that the compositors no doubt provided. This was a gothic type of US origin that was cast in Britain by Stephenson, Blake, Sheffield, but in fact the types look more like a similar but broader type, Miller & Richard’s Tudor Black. There are a few other wrong-fount characters throughout the text, probably used accidentally. They appear to be De Vinne, a common contemporary type that was used for display in The Workers’ Republic and other work that was probably printed at Liberty Hall.
The heading and the first three paragraphs were set and printed first, on the upper part of the sheet, and then the type of the text was distributed and reused to set the three last paragraphs and the signatures. An inverted e appears in first line of the last paragraph of all. The line ‘Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government,’ is in 24-point De Vinne. This section was made up in a forme that was printed at a second impression on the lower part of same sheet, the difficulties of getting good register from the clapped-out machine generally resulting in a gap between the two impressions that varies slightly from copy to copy. Nonetheless, despite the tight fit, the complete text appears on every copy. ‘It is a wonder how we produced it at all,’ said Molloy, fifty years later.
Molloy said that it took about three hours to print 1,000 copies of the Proclamation on the ‘old crook machine’. They finished at about one o'clock on Monday morning. ‘Nolan, Connolly's confidential man’, picked up the copies and took them away. The forme of the ‘half-sheet’ that was set to complete the text remained intact on the machine and was used, notwithstanding the damage that was done to Liberty Hall during the next few days by artillery fire, to make some imperfect impressions.
To summarize its chief features: a copy of the original Proclamation of 1916 is nominally Double Crown in size, 30 × 20 inches (76 × 51 cm), or slightly less if it has been trimmed. As the detail reproduced above shows, there is damage to the tails of the two letters R in the line IRISH REPUBLIC, damage that is very noticeable in the first of them and can be seen distinctly in every copy of the original. The first E in line 5, TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND, is an F, of which the lower right hand foot serif has been crudely extended (with sealing wax, according to the printers, although one would have thought that such brittle material would quickly have crumbled under the pressure of the cylinder of the printing machine). The thick and thin rule below the first line is slightly damaged at its right hand end. Almost all of these details would vanish from later reproductions of the Proclamation.
The earliest reproduction of the Proclamation that has so far been identified appears in the special issue of the Weekly Irish Times dated 13 May, from which the so-called Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook was derived, a detailed and relatively objective account of the events of the week of 24 to 29 April, from the taking of the General Post Office to the surrender of the rebels. They were in fact members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army and nothing to do with Sinn Féin, who at first were popularly believed to have been responsible for the Rising. The narrative was compiled from material gathered day by day by the reporters of the Irish Times, a journal that at the time was frankly hostile to the actions that had resulted in what it called ‘The darkest week in the history of Dublin — an orgie [sic] of fire and slaughter.’ Several editions of the Handbook were published from 1916 to 1918, and it was able to publish some documents that can only have come into the hands of its compilers from some very cooperative first-hand sources among the authorities.
This is the image that was published in the Weekly Irish Times and repeated in the Handbook, a photographic ‘line block’ or ‘zinc etching’ 220 × 145 mm in size. Line blocks were relief plates that were made from photographs that reduced an image to black or white, with no intermediate tones. The image was printed onto a zinc plate to act as as a ‘resist,’ and the exposed metal was etched away, thus creating a relief plate that was mounted on a wooden base for printing. It was common practice to ‘spot out’ the inevitable specks of dust and other unwanted marks that appeared on the negative and would have printed. The block maker, with or without encouragement, would often ‘improve’ the image in other ways before the block was made, restoring defective parts, a habit that was all too familiar to publishers of facsimiles of early printing who often found that long s had been helpfully converted to f by completing its apparently damaged crossbar. In this instance, the image of the Proclamation was very thoroughly improved. The damage to the two R’s in line 4 was eliminated. The improvised E in line 5 was completely redrawn to match the others, and the two inconsistent O's in the same line were made more like the others by filling in their decorative indents, though nothing could be done to make their different widths equal. One last, minute, piece of retouching in line 5 is worth noticing. The lower left-hand serif of the L in IRELAND failed to print well because the E to its left was higher, perhaps because it was less worn. At all events it prints heavily. The retoucher carefully restored the imperfect serif on L.
This image, unfaithful though it is in many details, is of considerable importance in the iconography of the Proclamation. It appears not only to have been the basis of countless reproductions in printed publications ever since, but it is also one of the most frequent images that is currently found online and downloaded, since it is the version offered by Wikipedia, and it can be seen on the web site of the Taoiseach. Such ‘improving’ of the image would have been found completely normal and even praiseworthy at the date when it was done, but the result is not authentic by modern standards and it does complicate the task of the historian of the original document.
For details of the making of the next version of the Proclamation we have only the account given by Bouch, who has a long section on the ‘re-printing and re-posting of the Irish Republican Proclamation at Easter, 1917’ to mark the anniversary of the Rising. This, he says, was done as part of a plan ‘to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion, and once more fan the flames of patriotism and intense nationalism’. Its promoters were, in his cautious phrase, ‘a small group of women attached to the Irish Citizen Army,’ members, as later commentators have added, of Cumann na mBán. ‘Their plan was to print and post up once more the printed Proclamation upon all the public buildings and vantage points in the City of Dublin’.
This is what Bouch wrote:
‘Mr. Walker (senior) and his son Mr. Frank Walker, employees of Mr. Joseph Stanley, a well-known Dublin printer, were the actual printers of this rare publication, and the order was given, by one of these women, for a re-issue which should bear more than a close resemblance to the original. Here again these two men had to work through the whole of Good Friday and part of Saturday, in the workshop at Upper Liffey Street, to fulfil their promise to carry out the order in time to allow of its distribution and posting. Such type as remained in the workshop at the rere [sic] of the “Co-op.” in Liberty Hall was collected, and it is of undoubted interest to relate that the same old fount was here again used for the second occasion. Naturally all the type sent out by West of Capel Street in the first instance could not be collected, but as much as possible was gathered and handed over to the printers. As results turned out they succeeded very well.’
This, it must be said, looks like nonsense. It is highly unlikely that enough of the original type was recovered to make a complete resetting of the original text. No copy that has been located corresponds to this description. The illustration that is given by Bouch shows that it reproduced the original setting of the text very exactly, with all its wrong fount characters and variable word-spacing, although the inverted letter ‘e’ near the end is corrected. (Characters in the right-hand margin are lost in the image shown here, made from a tightly bound copy.) But he also says that the type measure (the length of line) in the reprint was 17.75 inches instead of the 18.25 of the original. Reducing the measure, even by only half an inch, would have made an exact resetting with the original type, line for line, a great deal more difficult if not impossible, and even supposing that it had been possible to find enough of the original type, to attempt to recreate the exact mix of the wrong-fount characters and the inconsistent spacing of the original would have been pointlessly laborious.
The inevitable conclusion is that the ‘reprint of 1917’ was not printed from reset type but is the result of a photographic process, either a line block or (perhaps more likely in this case, given the size of the sheet) photolithography. There is less ‘improvement’ to this image than there is in that of the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook: the improvised F is still visible, but the first damaged R of IRISH is repaired and, as noted above, the inverted e in the fourth paragraph is corrected, making this the only known version of the Proclamation in which this was done. All the variable spacing of the original is exactly reproduced, and the wrong-fount letters, of which there were more than Bouch noted, are all in their places. The questions that are raised concerning Bouch’s own account of this version are hardly worth pursuing at length, since no original copy is known to survive today. But Bouch’s account of the recovery of the original types, which may have been derived from the story, perhaps a less than serious one, that was offered by the printers to the women of Cumann na mBán, has been repeated by other writers and needs to be questioned, since this enables us to conclude that photographic processes were used for all subsequent reprints of the original document, and that in these some retouching of the image was inevitable, with all its risks. The M in the name of Eamonn Ceannt among the signatures, which was obscured by dirt, was mistakenly retouched as N.
The only other version of the Proclamation that needs to be looked at in any detail is also known in only one copy, but this is easy to find on line and comes up very early in a Google image search. It is closely related in its details to the ubiquitous ‘Gill Sans’ version.
The version of the Proclamation in the O’Hegarty Collection of the Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas is a half-scale version that is 38 cm in height. There is extensive retouching of the kind that we have grown accustomed to, but this has been done quite independently of the version in the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook. The retouching was applied not only to the heading but to some quite minute details throughout the whole text, where imperfections in the original are painstakingly redrawn. The M in the name of Eamonn Ceannt is cleaner and sharper than it was in the original. The damage to the R’s in line 4 of the heading is repaired, and the improvised E in line 5 is of course redrawn, but in a different manner from that of the Sinn Fein version. Another instance of redrawing that is not found elsewhere is the F of OF in line 5 which has a sharp top right-angled corner which looks very different from the equivalent letter in the original. On the other hand, the serif of the L in the same line is not retouched (nor had it been in the ‘1917’ reprint). The broken end to the rule under the first line is repaired for the first time. It seemed worth taking some trouble to analyse this half-scale version because it corresponds in virtually every detail – with the exception of the reset line – with the ‘Gill Sans’ proclamation with which we began. However, there is one other detail in the ‘Kansas’ version that does not appear in the ‘Gill Sans’ one. On the right hand side of paragraph 4, the first part of the text that was reset, some spaces between the words have risen in several of the lines and their inked impressions are visible. These rising spaces can be seen in a few copies of the original Proclamation: those at Leinster House and the Ulster Museum, for example. In the ‘Gill Sans’ version they are all eliminated.
In the relatively high-resolution image of the ‘Kansas’ version that has kindly been provided and is shown above, it can be seen that the printing has the even overall ‘colour’ of a photographic reproduction, and is clearly the product either of a line block or photolithography. There appears to be no evidence with which to establish a date for this document, and one would need to examine it carefully to be sure of the process used, but it does not show the irregular inking and impression produced by the worn and damaged types of the original Proclamation. If the half-scale ‘Gill Sans’ version was produced in the 1950s or later, as seems at least possible, then printing by offset may have been be the more likely process for its production.
There is a variant of the ‘Gill Sans’ version that has an added and apparently wholly fictitious first line, THE PROCLAMATION OF, which is set in Cheltenham Bold Extended, a typeface of which the date was more or less contemporary with that of the Proclamation.
Not only does this especially inauthentic version of the ‘Gill Sans’ Proclamation appear on some artefacts, including mugs and t-shirts, but in the second edition of O’Connor’s book we find it reproduced (see above) with the claim that it is an image of the heading to the original Proclamation.
Here then, for the time being, are my conclusions. The original Proclamation measures about 30 × 20 inches in size, and it was printed from visibly worn and damaged type on a poor-quality paper. The damage to the tail of the R in IRISH in the heading can generally be spotted, even in thumbnail-size images.
There are two basic variations of the image of the Proclamation in common use, and both are retouched:
The earliest appears to be the version of 1916 made for the Weekly Irish Times in May 1916. This is adopted by Wikipedia among many other later users.
The other is the half-scale ‘Kansas’ facsimile, to which no date can be assigned, and from which the ‘Gill Sans’ variants that have multiplied across the Internet are derived.
There are at least two unretouched reproductions of the original – and who knows how many more there may be? A image of the original Proclamation appears online among illustrations of exhibits in an exhibition that was mounted in 2008 at the University Library, Otago, New Zealand, entitled ‘Éire á Móradh: Singing the Praises of Ireland’. The caption reads: ‘Facsimile, celebrating the 50th Anniversary, 1966. Private Collection.’ It is not known who made this large scale (full-scale?) reproduction, nor from which original copy, nor whether more copies of it were made. The colour of the paper appears curiously reddish, but seen online, in its frame, it looks remarkably convincing. Investigations are continuing.
The Historical Documents Company, Philadelphia, produces a series of ‘antiqued parchment replicas that look and feel old’, mostly of documents relating to the history of the United States. Among them is a reduced reproduction of the original Proclamation on a sheet measuring 16 × 14 inches. The reproduction appears not to be retouched, except for a slight reduction to the damage to the R of IRISH in the heading, but it is of course smaller than the original, and the image does not appear to be very sharp. The words ‘Easter Monday April 24, 1916’ are added in an incongrouous sanserif typeface at the lower left hand corner.
Copies of the original Proclamation
A more comprehensive census of copies of the original is in preparation. This is a brief list of the copies that are known to exist in publicly accessible collections.
There are eight copies in Dublin, at these locations: General Post Office, Kilmainham Jail Museum, National Library of Ireland, National Museum of Ireland (3 copies), National Print Museum, Parliament Buildings (Leinster House), Trinity College Library (2 copies).
Only two copies are known to exist outside Dublin: one is at the Ulster Museum, to which it was presented by a Belfast man who, being in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916, reputedly had a copy thrust into his hands as he passed the GPO and later realised its historical significance. It is on view in the new ‘Plantation to Power-sharing’ history gallery of the museum, which was re-opened after refurbishment in October 2009. The other copy is at Providence, Rhode Island, USA (which incidentally houses the typographical library of D. B. Updike). This is the only copy known to exist in a publicly accessible collection in the USA. A report that there was a copy at Harvard turns out to be unfounded. The half-scale reproduction at Lawrence, Kansas, which can be found online, is discussed above.
The presence on the Web of some online images of the original Proclamation that do not appear to tally with any of the copies listed above suggests that there may be some in small museums or other collections in Ireland or elsewhere. These are under investigation, but suggestions for additions to the list will be welcome. There are certainly copies in private hands, including many of those sold recently at auction.
The catalogue entry for the copy sold at Whyte’s, Dublin, 12 June 2005, included this statement: ‘Two [copies] exist in British Government archives and there is one in the Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace.’ The custodians of the Royal Collections tell me that they are not aware of any copies but will continue to investigate. It is not impossible that there may be other copies in the UK; for example, as O’Connor plausibly suggests, among papers relating to the Court Martials that followed the Rising, but none has yet been reported.
Reprints of the text
No manuscript copy for the text of the Proclamation is known to survive. The chief hand in its composition is often said to be that of P. H. Pearse, but all the signatories took responsibility for it. It is read aloud on national occasions; it has been cast in bronze; and it is often reprinted. It appeared as a small book, designed by Liam Miller, set in the Hammer Uncial type and printed at the Dolmen Press in 1975. Multiple versions are, of course, findable on the Web.
This is probably the first reprint of the text of the Proclamation that was made, and it seems worth recording because it is not widely known and also because it is so intimately tied to the larger version by its date and the personalities who must have been responsible for it. Its size made it easier to handle and, at the date of its printing (which was probably between 25 and 28 April), it must have been equally damning to the signatories in the view of the authorities. It is a small leaflet on poor quality paper 218 × 142 mm, which is among the papers in the British National Archives of William Wylie, who had the role of prosecutor at the Court Martials of May 1916. There is also a copy at the National Library of Ireland. A barely legible note in ink on the reverse appears to include the date 30/4/16. One of the types, a distinctive sanserif titling, also appears in a leaflet of which the heading is shown below. It is the same size and printed on similar paper, and is known as the ‘Second War Bulletin’. It was signed by P. H. Pearse as ‘Commanding in Chief of the Forces of the Irish Republic and President of the Provisional Government.’
The same type also appears in the heading of the first and only issue of Irish War News, dated Tuesday 25 April, which includes the ‘First War Bulletin’. All three of these pieces of printing can be attributed without much doubt to the printing office of Joseph Stanley, the Gaelic Press in Upper Liffey Street, and were perhaps all printed within days of each other. A detailed investigation of the printing that was done at the printing offices at Liberty Hall and at the Gaelic Press, whether acknowledged or not, recording their printing materials, would be a useful project.
The Proclamation in the sale room, 1998 to 2009
This is a summary list of recent auctions at which copies of the Proclamation have been put up for sale, with a note of the prices realized. I shall be grateful for additions and corrections.
5 December 1998. Mealy’s, Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. £26,000.
1 January 2001. Whyte’s, Dublin. £52,000.
11 December 2003. Sotheby’s, London (L03409). Lot 5. £69,600.
8 July 2004. Sotheby’s, London (L04407). Lot 9. £123,200.
16 December 2004. Sotheby’s, London (L04413), Lot 35. £168,000.
12 June 2005. Whyte’s, Dublin. €125,000.
12 April 2006. James Adam & Sons, Dublin. Lot 404. €200,000.
17 April 2007. James Adam & Sons, Dublin. Lot 409, €240,000.
15 April 2008. Adam’s and Mealy’s, Dublin. Lot 587. €360,000.
11 December 2008. Sotheby’s, New York (N08501). Lot 179. Estimate $180,000 to $275,000. No sale.
28 April 2009. Adam’s and Mealy’s, Dublin. Lot 630. €220,000.
Sources
These are the chief sources that relate directly to the printing of the Proclamation:
Joseph J. Bouch, The Republican Proclamation of Easter Monday, 1916 (Dublin, 1936). Bibliographical Society of Ireland. Publications, vol. 5, no. 3. Reprinted 1954.
John O’Connor, The 1916 Proclamation (Dublin: Anvil Books in association with Irish Books and Media, Minneapolis, 1999). Second revised edition of The Story of the 1916 Proclamation (Dublin: Abbey Press, 1986).
Tom Reilly, Joe Stanley, printer to the Rising (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Books, Mount Eagle Publications, 2005).
Michael J. Molloy, ‘He helped to print the Proclamation.’ My Easter week, by members of the rank and file. The first in a special daily series of first-hand accounts of events during, or leading up to, the Easter Rising. Evening Herald, Dublin, 4 April 1966, page 6.
The literature of the Easter Rising is extensive. Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: the Irish rebellion (London: Allen Lane, 2005), cited above, has an up to date bibliography and list of sources. Its image of the Proclamation, reproduced on page xx and of which the source is properly acknowledged, is from one of the copies at the National Museum of Ireland. It is the copy acquired from Dr Kathleen Lynn in 1934, reference EW2, endorsed by the compositors and the printer, and with the signatures of eleven of the prisoners in Montjoy dated 19 May 1916.
Among online sources, the Irish Times web site, made in 2006 in association with the Department of Education & Science, gives an excellent overview of the events and has an extensive reading list.
See also The 1916 rising: personalities and perspectives, the online exhibition of the National Library of Ireland. The image above is from the exhibition and is shown here by courtesy of the National Library. Its caption, with the reference to the original photograph, is: ‘Dr Edward McWeeney reading a copy of the Proclamation on Easter Monday, 24 April. Seeing it posted on the railings of 86 St. Stephen’s Green, McWeeney, a University College Dublin academic, took it to the garden at the back where he had this photograph taken by Fr Sherwin CC. (PC04, Lot 28)’.
The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, compiled and published by the Weekly Irish Times, cited above is an invaluable narrative of the events. It appears to have been reprinted several times between 1916 and 1918, mostly from existing stereotype plates but with the addition of some new matter. Fortunately – since it was printed on an acidic ‘mechanical wood’ paper that has decayed badly – there is a digital version of the 1917 edition, issued by Archive CD Books Ireland, Dublin.
Acknowledgements
This text could not have been compiled without the help of members of the staff of many institutions who have responded with great generosity to my queries. I would like to thank most especially individuals at the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, Trinity College and University College, Dublin; at the Ulster Museum, Belfast; at the the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; and at Harvard University, Cambridge, MS, USA. My especially heartfelt thanks are due to Richard Ring, curator of special collections at Providence Public Library, Providence, RI, USA, for his help, and to the library for providing and permitting the use of a scan of the copy of the Proclamation in their possession, without which I should have not have found a detailed study of the types possible. It is a part of the George W. Potter and Alfred M. Williams Memorial Collection on Irish Culture, and was acquired in Dublin in 1949.
I shall be grateful to receive notice of additions and corrections.
‘All changed, changed utterly.’
We now know that the ‘Easter Rising’, which began in confusion and and ended in surrender and apparent failure, coming as it did after so many other fruitless historical ‘rebellions’, proved to be the genesis of the present Irish Republic.
The lecture was published in Dublin in 1965 under the title of Yeats and the Easter Rising, the first of a series of Dolmen Press Yeats Centenary Studies. Edward Malins, a friend of a friend, kindly sent me a copy. It included the illustration of the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ that appears above. When I first saw it, the image immediately struck me as odd, absurd, or even worse. A fake? A forgery? Whatever the answer might be, when I put the question it did not seem to arouse much interest at the time. However it now appears to me that for a number of reasons this may be a good moment for the image of the Proclamation to be examined rather more critically and closely. One of them is the multiplication of different versions on the Internet, the authenticity of some of which appears questionable. And another is that preparations to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, of which the Proclamation is one of the accepted symbols, appear to be already under way.
The incongruous feature of the illustration in the essay by Malins (as many readers of this blog will already have spotted) is that the line IRISH REPUBLIC is set in a well-known typeface that did not exist in 1916. It is Gill Sans Extra Bold, made in 1931 by the English Monotype Corporation as a variant of its Gill Sans of 1927. This is how the line looks, set in the present-day digital version of the type:
And this is how it had appeared in the original Proclamation.
The photograph of the Proclamation used in the printed lecture in 1965 appears to have been supplied to the Dolmen Press by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. The error was all the more unfortunate because the library does possess a genuine original that was presented to it by its former employee, Seán O’Kelly, who had helped to distribute the Proclamation in 1916. It can be seen on the library's web site. (When, as President of Ireland, he gave another copy to Leinster House, the home of the Irish parliament, where it is displayed, he described himself in his speech as bill-poster to the republic.)
Of course this example illustrates yet again, as in the case of the Trieste Leaf, the value of at least some knowledge of the history of printing types to librarians who may need to assess the authenticity and the date of a piece of anonymous printing; but it also suggests that there was at the time, as there still is today, widespread uncertainty about the exact details of the original Proclamation. The date of the ‘Gill Sans’ version, if we may call it that, clearly cannot be earlier than 1931. In fact it seems likely to be considerably later, but at present there seem to be no clues to the identity of its maker nor to its exact date. Nor is it easy to guess why this line, among the others in the heading, all of which were set in types that are more or less battered and not at all modern, should have been replaced with a line in a widely used and familiar style. (There are in fact a few instances of the ‘Gill Sans’ version of the Proclamation in which the line appears artificially ‘distressed' in the manner of fake antique furniture.) A copy that is in the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library of University College, Dublin, measures 38 cm in height, just half the size of the original, with which it is therefore unlikely to be confused. However, as an image of the Proclamation on web pages, where questions of scale are irrelevant, the ‘Gill Sans’ version is currently in disturbingly common use. A detailed account of the Easter Rising by the BBC shows it and, by implication, offers it as an authentic image. And so, no doubt in equally perfect good faith, do many Web sites, based on both sides of the Atlantic, that are dedicated to the Irish republican movement. It is an element in posters that commemorate the seven signatories and the Easter Rising; it appears on t-shirts and mugs; and it is available on a reduced scale, framed, for hanging at home.
In his recent and much-praised account of the Easter Rising Charles Townshend called the making of the Proclamation ‘a minor epic of printing’, and so it was. And he adds this passage on the text of the document:
‘Reproduced countless times, and still serving as the title deed of Irish republicanism, the terms of the proclamation were a kind of distillation of national doctrine, a kind of national poem: lucid, terse, and strangely moving, even to unbelievers.’
The original printed text, produced in circumstances of personal danger to all those involved and achieved only by overcoming formidable material difficulties, is a rare and fragile document of which the evident technical imperfections make one all the more aware of aware how risky the whole enterprise was. For this reason the original version seems to me the only one worth illustrating, and the present exercise is an attempt to find why there are so many enhanced imitations in circulation. The example cited above is only one, albeit one of the worst, of several versions of the Proclamation that do not represent the original printed document. The object of the present enquiry is to identify the different versions, to find where they come from, to see how they differ from the original, and to try to clear up some of the confusion. This is work that is still very much in progress, but it seemed to be worth reporting on. It could not have got as far as it has without some very generous help from others, notably from curators of the collections where copies are to be found.
The proliferation of so many images of the document on the Web is a development that has largely taken place during the last decade. So, too, is another element in the story, namely the greatly increased prices that copies have brought in the sale room, from £26,000 at Mealy’s in Dublin in December 1998 to €360,000 in April 2008 and €220,000 in April 2009 at joint sales by Adam's and Mealy’s. Eleven copies have been put up for sale since 1998 to my knowledge, and ten have sold. (See the summary at the end of this post.) They confirm the prominent place that the document holds among the relics of the Rising, and it should be said that, thanks not least to careful cataloguing by the auctioneers and the fact that their texts and images are published online, there is not the least doubt that every one of the examples that has been sold has been an original copy.
Any attempt to identify the original Proclamation and to distinguish the various images that are derived from it must begin with the records, such as they are, of its making. There have been effectively only two published accounts that attempt to do this (I will give full details and some other references at the end), but an unexpectedly vivid first-hand account has recently been made available and it fills in some of the detail that was lacking.
In 1936, twenty years after the events of 1916, Joseph Bouch published the paper on ‘The Republican Proclamation of Easter Monday, 1916’ that he had given to the Irish Bibliographical Society. In 1986, Michael O’Connor published his own narrative, in which he offered to provide an answer to the question, ‘how would you know a true original’. It is clear that he derived much of his account from Bouch (mostly using Bouch’s own words), but he added further details, including a useful list of copies of the original Proclamation and their locations, and his text was issued in a revised and expanded edition in 1999. Bouch had the advantage of having spoken to the original printers, and his text is on the whole a piece of sober and precise bibliographical description. Unfortunately it is all too clear that there were limits to his understanding of the materials and processes used in printing, and this occasionally makes it unwise to rely on his text. O’Connor evidently used other sources too, including some more recent ones, and the additional detail he provides is useful. But one wishes that he could have said what they were and brought some critical judgement to bear on them.
The image of the original Proclamation reproduced here, like some other details of it that appear in this blog, are from a copy that is shown by courtesy of the Providence Public Library, Providence, Rhode Island, USA (which incidentally houses the typographical library of D. B. Updike). As noted below, it is the only copy of the original Proclamation that is known to exist in a publicly accessible collection in the USA.
The Proclamation was printed during Sunday and Monday, 23 and 24 April 1916, on an old and poorly-maintained Wharfedale cylinder machine in a small printing office that had been set up by James Connolly in the basement at Liberty Hall in Beresford Place, the headquarters building of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union of which he was General Secretary, in order to print his paper The Workers’ Republic.
It may have been a modest office, but it cannot, as O’Connor writes, have measured seven feet by nine, which is an area a little smaller than the overall size of the printing machine alone. The Workers’ Republic was simply but well produced. Indeed the later issues are so well set and printed that one is tempted to wonder if it may not have migrated secretly to another printing office. But if any issues at all came from Liberty Hall, then in addition to space in which to house the machine and to work it, there must have been room for racks for cases of type, some perhaps with brackets above to make frames for the compositors to work at, a proofing device and a stone on which to make up the formes.
Michael Molloy and Liam O’Brien were the compositors and Christopher Brady operated the machine. According to Molloy, who was interviewed in 1966, ‘Connolly told us that what we would print would be a document that would live in history.’ He directed that it should be similar in appearance to an auctioneer’s notice. The paper, bought specially for the job and sufficient to print 2,500 copies, was a poor quality Double Crown, a common size for a poster, nominally 30 × 20 inches (about 76 × 51 cm). The office lacked the large types that were needed for the main text and as Bouch records, making a rare deviation from the cool and impersonal language of bibliography, it was brought in four cases on a hand barrow from the printing office of ‘an Englishman named William Henry West from Capel Street, a most estimable man and a great rebel at heart’.
The larger types are of wood. They are very worn and some are damaged. In original copies, it can be seen that the tail of the letter R of IRISH in the line IRISH REPUBLIC in the heading shows the impact of some square object, and some corners of both R’s are bruised. There is slight damage to the right hand end of the thick and thin rule below the first line of the heading. The E of the word THE in the line TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND had been contrived, as the printers told Bouch, by adding a piece of sealing wax to the foot of an F, since there were no more E’s in the fount.
According to Bouch the metal type used to set the text of the Proclamation was a Two-line Great Primer or about 36 points. It can be identified as the Antique No. 8 of the typefounders Miller & Richard of Edinburgh, a type of the latter part of the 19th century that was still in common use for poster work. There was not enough of it to set even the first three paragraphs of the text so, as Bouch noted, the letter e from a very different fount was used in the last lines of the third paragraph in order to eke out the failing supply of this letter.
He gives the name of this type as Abbey Text, a name that the compositors no doubt provided. This was a gothic type of US origin that was cast in Britain by Stephenson, Blake, Sheffield, but in fact the types look more like a similar but broader type, Miller & Richard’s Tudor Black. There are a few other wrong-fount characters throughout the text, probably used accidentally. They appear to be De Vinne, a common contemporary type that was used for display in The Workers’ Republic and other work that was probably printed at Liberty Hall.
The heading and the first three paragraphs were set and printed first, on the upper part of the sheet, and then the type of the text was distributed and reused to set the three last paragraphs and the signatures. An inverted e appears in first line of the last paragraph of all. The line ‘Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government,’ is in 24-point De Vinne. This section was made up in a forme that was printed at a second impression on the lower part of same sheet, the difficulties of getting good register from the clapped-out machine generally resulting in a gap between the two impressions that varies slightly from copy to copy. Nonetheless, despite the tight fit, the complete text appears on every copy. ‘It is a wonder how we produced it at all,’ said Molloy, fifty years later.
Molloy said that it took about three hours to print 1,000 copies of the Proclamation on the ‘old crook machine’. They finished at about one o'clock on Monday morning. ‘Nolan, Connolly's confidential man’, picked up the copies and took them away. The forme of the ‘half-sheet’ that was set to complete the text remained intact on the machine and was used, notwithstanding the damage that was done to Liberty Hall during the next few days by artillery fire, to make some imperfect impressions.
To summarize its chief features: a copy of the original Proclamation of 1916 is nominally Double Crown in size, 30 × 20 inches (76 × 51 cm), or slightly less if it has been trimmed. As the detail reproduced above shows, there is damage to the tails of the two letters R in the line IRISH REPUBLIC, damage that is very noticeable in the first of them and can be seen distinctly in every copy of the original. The first E in line 5, TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND, is an F, of which the lower right hand foot serif has been crudely extended (with sealing wax, according to the printers, although one would have thought that such brittle material would quickly have crumbled under the pressure of the cylinder of the printing machine). The thick and thin rule below the first line is slightly damaged at its right hand end. Almost all of these details would vanish from later reproductions of the Proclamation.
The earliest reproduction of the Proclamation that has so far been identified appears in the special issue of the Weekly Irish Times dated 13 May, from which the so-called Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook was derived, a detailed and relatively objective account of the events of the week of 24 to 29 April, from the taking of the General Post Office to the surrender of the rebels. They were in fact members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army and nothing to do with Sinn Féin, who at first were popularly believed to have been responsible for the Rising. The narrative was compiled from material gathered day by day by the reporters of the Irish Times, a journal that at the time was frankly hostile to the actions that had resulted in what it called ‘The darkest week in the history of Dublin — an orgie [sic] of fire and slaughter.’ Several editions of the Handbook were published from 1916 to 1918, and it was able to publish some documents that can only have come into the hands of its compilers from some very cooperative first-hand sources among the authorities.
This is the image that was published in the Weekly Irish Times and repeated in the Handbook, a photographic ‘line block’ or ‘zinc etching’ 220 × 145 mm in size. Line blocks were relief plates that were made from photographs that reduced an image to black or white, with no intermediate tones. The image was printed onto a zinc plate to act as as a ‘resist,’ and the exposed metal was etched away, thus creating a relief plate that was mounted on a wooden base for printing. It was common practice to ‘spot out’ the inevitable specks of dust and other unwanted marks that appeared on the negative and would have printed. The block maker, with or without encouragement, would often ‘improve’ the image in other ways before the block was made, restoring defective parts, a habit that was all too familiar to publishers of facsimiles of early printing who often found that long s had been helpfully converted to f by completing its apparently damaged crossbar. In this instance, the image of the Proclamation was very thoroughly improved. The damage to the two R’s in line 4 was eliminated. The improvised E in line 5 was completely redrawn to match the others, and the two inconsistent O's in the same line were made more like the others by filling in their decorative indents, though nothing could be done to make their different widths equal. One last, minute, piece of retouching in line 5 is worth noticing. The lower left-hand serif of the L in IRELAND failed to print well because the E to its left was higher, perhaps because it was less worn. At all events it prints heavily. The retoucher carefully restored the imperfect serif on L.
This image, unfaithful though it is in many details, is of considerable importance in the iconography of the Proclamation. It appears not only to have been the basis of countless reproductions in printed publications ever since, but it is also one of the most frequent images that is currently found online and downloaded, since it is the version offered by Wikipedia, and it can be seen on the web site of the Taoiseach. Such ‘improving’ of the image would have been found completely normal and even praiseworthy at the date when it was done, but the result is not authentic by modern standards and it does complicate the task of the historian of the original document.
For details of the making of the next version of the Proclamation we have only the account given by Bouch, who has a long section on the ‘re-printing and re-posting of the Irish Republican Proclamation at Easter, 1917’ to mark the anniversary of the Rising. This, he says, was done as part of a plan ‘to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion, and once more fan the flames of patriotism and intense nationalism’. Its promoters were, in his cautious phrase, ‘a small group of women attached to the Irish Citizen Army,’ members, as later commentators have added, of Cumann na mBán. ‘Their plan was to print and post up once more the printed Proclamation upon all the public buildings and vantage points in the City of Dublin’.
This is what Bouch wrote:
‘Mr. Walker (senior) and his son Mr. Frank Walker, employees of Mr. Joseph Stanley, a well-known Dublin printer, were the actual printers of this rare publication, and the order was given, by one of these women, for a re-issue which should bear more than a close resemblance to the original. Here again these two men had to work through the whole of Good Friday and part of Saturday, in the workshop at Upper Liffey Street, to fulfil their promise to carry out the order in time to allow of its distribution and posting. Such type as remained in the workshop at the rere [sic] of the “Co-op.” in Liberty Hall was collected, and it is of undoubted interest to relate that the same old fount was here again used for the second occasion. Naturally all the type sent out by West of Capel Street in the first instance could not be collected, but as much as possible was gathered and handed over to the printers. As results turned out they succeeded very well.’
This, it must be said, looks like nonsense. It is highly unlikely that enough of the original type was recovered to make a complete resetting of the original text. No copy that has been located corresponds to this description. The illustration that is given by Bouch shows that it reproduced the original setting of the text very exactly, with all its wrong fount characters and variable word-spacing, although the inverted letter ‘e’ near the end is corrected. (Characters in the right-hand margin are lost in the image shown here, made from a tightly bound copy.) But he also says that the type measure (the length of line) in the reprint was 17.75 inches instead of the 18.25 of the original. Reducing the measure, even by only half an inch, would have made an exact resetting with the original type, line for line, a great deal more difficult if not impossible, and even supposing that it had been possible to find enough of the original type, to attempt to recreate the exact mix of the wrong-fount characters and the inconsistent spacing of the original would have been pointlessly laborious.
The inevitable conclusion is that the ‘reprint of 1917’ was not printed from reset type but is the result of a photographic process, either a line block or (perhaps more likely in this case, given the size of the sheet) photolithography. There is less ‘improvement’ to this image than there is in that of the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook: the improvised F is still visible, but the first damaged R of IRISH is repaired and, as noted above, the inverted e in the fourth paragraph is corrected, making this the only known version of the Proclamation in which this was done. All the variable spacing of the original is exactly reproduced, and the wrong-fount letters, of which there were more than Bouch noted, are all in their places. The questions that are raised concerning Bouch’s own account of this version are hardly worth pursuing at length, since no original copy is known to survive today. But Bouch’s account of the recovery of the original types, which may have been derived from the story, perhaps a less than serious one, that was offered by the printers to the women of Cumann na mBán, has been repeated by other writers and needs to be questioned, since this enables us to conclude that photographic processes were used for all subsequent reprints of the original document, and that in these some retouching of the image was inevitable, with all its risks. The M in the name of Eamonn Ceannt among the signatures, which was obscured by dirt, was mistakenly retouched as N.
The only other version of the Proclamation that needs to be looked at in any detail is also known in only one copy, but this is easy to find on line and comes up very early in a Google image search. It is closely related in its details to the ubiquitous ‘Gill Sans’ version.
The version of the Proclamation in the O’Hegarty Collection of the Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas is a half-scale version that is 38 cm in height. There is extensive retouching of the kind that we have grown accustomed to, but this has been done quite independently of the version in the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook. The retouching was applied not only to the heading but to some quite minute details throughout the whole text, where imperfections in the original are painstakingly redrawn. The M in the name of Eamonn Ceannt is cleaner and sharper than it was in the original. The damage to the R’s in line 4 of the heading is repaired, and the improvised E in line 5 is of course redrawn, but in a different manner from that of the Sinn Fein version. Another instance of redrawing that is not found elsewhere is the F of OF in line 5 which has a sharp top right-angled corner which looks very different from the equivalent letter in the original. On the other hand, the serif of the L in the same line is not retouched (nor had it been in the ‘1917’ reprint). The broken end to the rule under the first line is repaired for the first time. It seemed worth taking some trouble to analyse this half-scale version because it corresponds in virtually every detail – with the exception of the reset line – with the ‘Gill Sans’ proclamation with which we began. However, there is one other detail in the ‘Kansas’ version that does not appear in the ‘Gill Sans’ one. On the right hand side of paragraph 4, the first part of the text that was reset, some spaces between the words have risen in several of the lines and their inked impressions are visible. These rising spaces can be seen in a few copies of the original Proclamation: those at Leinster House and the Ulster Museum, for example. In the ‘Gill Sans’ version they are all eliminated.
In the relatively high-resolution image of the ‘Kansas’ version that has kindly been provided and is shown above, it can be seen that the printing has the even overall ‘colour’ of a photographic reproduction, and is clearly the product either of a line block or photolithography. There appears to be no evidence with which to establish a date for this document, and one would need to examine it carefully to be sure of the process used, but it does not show the irregular inking and impression produced by the worn and damaged types of the original Proclamation. If the half-scale ‘Gill Sans’ version was produced in the 1950s or later, as seems at least possible, then printing by offset may have been be the more likely process for its production.
There is a variant of the ‘Gill Sans’ version that has an added and apparently wholly fictitious first line, THE PROCLAMATION OF, which is set in Cheltenham Bold Extended, a typeface of which the date was more or less contemporary with that of the Proclamation.
Not only does this especially inauthentic version of the ‘Gill Sans’ Proclamation appear on some artefacts, including mugs and t-shirts, but in the second edition of O’Connor’s book we find it reproduced (see above) with the claim that it is an image of the heading to the original Proclamation.
Here then, for the time being, are my conclusions. The original Proclamation measures about 30 × 20 inches in size, and it was printed from visibly worn and damaged type on a poor-quality paper. The damage to the tail of the R in IRISH in the heading can generally be spotted, even in thumbnail-size images.
There are two basic variations of the image of the Proclamation in common use, and both are retouched:
The earliest appears to be the version of 1916 made for the Weekly Irish Times in May 1916. This is adopted by Wikipedia among many other later users.
The other is the half-scale ‘Kansas’ facsimile, to which no date can be assigned, and from which the ‘Gill Sans’ variants that have multiplied across the Internet are derived.
There are at least two unretouched reproductions of the original – and who knows how many more there may be? A image of the original Proclamation appears online among illustrations of exhibits in an exhibition that was mounted in 2008 at the University Library, Otago, New Zealand, entitled ‘Éire á Móradh: Singing the Praises of Ireland’. The caption reads: ‘Facsimile, celebrating the 50th Anniversary, 1966. Private Collection.’ It is not known who made this large scale (full-scale?) reproduction, nor from which original copy, nor whether more copies of it were made. The colour of the paper appears curiously reddish, but seen online, in its frame, it looks remarkably convincing. Investigations are continuing.
The Historical Documents Company, Philadelphia, produces a series of ‘antiqued parchment replicas that look and feel old’, mostly of documents relating to the history of the United States. Among them is a reduced reproduction of the original Proclamation on a sheet measuring 16 × 14 inches. The reproduction appears not to be retouched, except for a slight reduction to the damage to the R of IRISH in the heading, but it is of course smaller than the original, and the image does not appear to be very sharp. The words ‘Easter Monday April 24, 1916’ are added in an incongrouous sanserif typeface at the lower left hand corner.
Copies of the original Proclamation
A more comprehensive census of copies of the original is in preparation. This is a brief list of the copies that are known to exist in publicly accessible collections.
There are eight copies in Dublin, at these locations: General Post Office, Kilmainham Jail Museum, National Library of Ireland, National Museum of Ireland (3 copies), National Print Museum, Parliament Buildings (Leinster House), Trinity College Library (2 copies).
Only two copies are known to exist outside Dublin: one is at the Ulster Museum, to which it was presented by a Belfast man who, being in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916, reputedly had a copy thrust into his hands as he passed the GPO and later realised its historical significance. It is on view in the new ‘Plantation to Power-sharing’ history gallery of the museum, which was re-opened after refurbishment in October 2009. The other copy is at Providence, Rhode Island, USA (which incidentally houses the typographical library of D. B. Updike). This is the only copy known to exist in a publicly accessible collection in the USA. A report that there was a copy at Harvard turns out to be unfounded. The half-scale reproduction at Lawrence, Kansas, which can be found online, is discussed above.
The presence on the Web of some online images of the original Proclamation that do not appear to tally with any of the copies listed above suggests that there may be some in small museums or other collections in Ireland or elsewhere. These are under investigation, but suggestions for additions to the list will be welcome. There are certainly copies in private hands, including many of those sold recently at auction.
The catalogue entry for the copy sold at Whyte’s, Dublin, 12 June 2005, included this statement: ‘Two [copies] exist in British Government archives and there is one in the Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace.’ The custodians of the Royal Collections tell me that they are not aware of any copies but will continue to investigate. It is not impossible that there may be other copies in the UK; for example, as O’Connor plausibly suggests, among papers relating to the Court Martials that followed the Rising, but none has yet been reported.
Reprints of the text
No manuscript copy for the text of the Proclamation is known to survive. The chief hand in its composition is often said to be that of P. H. Pearse, but all the signatories took responsibility for it. It is read aloud on national occasions; it has been cast in bronze; and it is often reprinted. It appeared as a small book, designed by Liam Miller, set in the Hammer Uncial type and printed at the Dolmen Press in 1975. Multiple versions are, of course, findable on the Web.
This is probably the first reprint of the text of the Proclamation that was made, and it seems worth recording because it is not widely known and also because it is so intimately tied to the larger version by its date and the personalities who must have been responsible for it. Its size made it easier to handle and, at the date of its printing (which was probably between 25 and 28 April), it must have been equally damning to the signatories in the view of the authorities. It is a small leaflet on poor quality paper 218 × 142 mm, which is among the papers in the British National Archives of William Wylie, who had the role of prosecutor at the Court Martials of May 1916. There is also a copy at the National Library of Ireland. A barely legible note in ink on the reverse appears to include the date 30/4/16. One of the types, a distinctive sanserif titling, also appears in a leaflet of which the heading is shown below. It is the same size and printed on similar paper, and is known as the ‘Second War Bulletin’. It was signed by P. H. Pearse as ‘Commanding in Chief of the Forces of the Irish Republic and President of the Provisional Government.’
The same type also appears in the heading of the first and only issue of Irish War News, dated Tuesday 25 April, which includes the ‘First War Bulletin’. All three of these pieces of printing can be attributed without much doubt to the printing office of Joseph Stanley, the Gaelic Press in Upper Liffey Street, and were perhaps all printed within days of each other. A detailed investigation of the printing that was done at the printing offices at Liberty Hall and at the Gaelic Press, whether acknowledged or not, recording their printing materials, would be a useful project.
The Proclamation in the sale room, 1998 to 2009
This is a summary list of recent auctions at which copies of the Proclamation have been put up for sale, with a note of the prices realized. I shall be grateful for additions and corrections.
5 December 1998. Mealy’s, Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. £26,000.
1 January 2001. Whyte’s, Dublin. £52,000.
11 December 2003. Sotheby’s, London (L03409). Lot 5. £69,600.
8 July 2004. Sotheby’s, London (L04407). Lot 9. £123,200.
16 December 2004. Sotheby’s, London (L04413), Lot 35. £168,000.
12 June 2005. Whyte’s, Dublin. €125,000.
12 April 2006. James Adam & Sons, Dublin. Lot 404. €200,000.
17 April 2007. James Adam & Sons, Dublin. Lot 409, €240,000.
15 April 2008. Adam’s and Mealy’s, Dublin. Lot 587. €360,000.
11 December 2008. Sotheby’s, New York (N08501). Lot 179. Estimate $180,000 to $275,000. No sale.
28 April 2009. Adam’s and Mealy’s, Dublin. Lot 630. €220,000.
Sources
These are the chief sources that relate directly to the printing of the Proclamation:
Joseph J. Bouch, The Republican Proclamation of Easter Monday, 1916 (Dublin, 1936). Bibliographical Society of Ireland. Publications, vol. 5, no. 3. Reprinted 1954.
John O’Connor, The 1916 Proclamation (Dublin: Anvil Books in association with Irish Books and Media, Minneapolis, 1999). Second revised edition of The Story of the 1916 Proclamation (Dublin: Abbey Press, 1986).
Tom Reilly, Joe Stanley, printer to the Rising (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Books, Mount Eagle Publications, 2005).
Michael J. Molloy, ‘He helped to print the Proclamation.’ My Easter week, by members of the rank and file. The first in a special daily series of first-hand accounts of events during, or leading up to, the Easter Rising. Evening Herald, Dublin, 4 April 1966, page 6.
The literature of the Easter Rising is extensive. Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: the Irish rebellion (London: Allen Lane, 2005), cited above, has an up to date bibliography and list of sources. Its image of the Proclamation, reproduced on page xx and of which the source is properly acknowledged, is from one of the copies at the National Museum of Ireland. It is the copy acquired from Dr Kathleen Lynn in 1934, reference EW2, endorsed by the compositors and the printer, and with the signatures of eleven of the prisoners in Montjoy dated 19 May 1916.
Among online sources, the Irish Times web site, made in 2006 in association with the Department of Education & Science, gives an excellent overview of the events and has an extensive reading list.
See also The 1916 rising: personalities and perspectives, the online exhibition of the National Library of Ireland. The image above is from the exhibition and is shown here by courtesy of the National Library. Its caption, with the reference to the original photograph, is: ‘Dr Edward McWeeney reading a copy of the Proclamation on Easter Monday, 24 April. Seeing it posted on the railings of 86 St. Stephen’s Green, McWeeney, a University College Dublin academic, took it to the garden at the back where he had this photograph taken by Fr Sherwin CC. (PC04, Lot 28)’.
The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, compiled and published by the Weekly Irish Times, cited above is an invaluable narrative of the events. It appears to have been reprinted several times between 1916 and 1918, mostly from existing stereotype plates but with the addition of some new matter. Fortunately – since it was printed on an acidic ‘mechanical wood’ paper that has decayed badly – there is a digital version of the 1917 edition, issued by Archive CD Books Ireland, Dublin.
Acknowledgements
This text could not have been compiled without the help of members of the staff of many institutions who have responded with great generosity to my queries. I would like to thank most especially individuals at the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, Trinity College and University College, Dublin; at the Ulster Museum, Belfast; at the the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; and at Harvard University, Cambridge, MS, USA. My especially heartfelt thanks are due to Richard Ring, curator of special collections at Providence Public Library, Providence, RI, USA, for his help, and to the library for providing and permitting the use of a scan of the copy of the Proclamation in their possession, without which I should have not have found a detailed study of the types possible. It is a part of the George W. Potter and Alfred M. Williams Memorial Collection on Irish Culture, and was acquired in Dublin in 1949.
I shall be grateful to receive notice of additions and corrections.
posted by Typefounder at 10:15
