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To mark our contribution to this year’s Pride Month we currently have a display of a penal file relating to the case of James Pillar, who was imprisoned as a result of a major scandal in Ireland, the Dublin Castle Scandal of 1884.  James Pillar’s penal file (ref. GPB/PEN/ 1895/54) gives an insight into life in prison with photographs taken at the beginning and end of his incarceration showing how dramatically he had aged in less than ten years.  Guest blogger Brian Crowley, Curator of Collections for Kilmainham Gaol Museum and the Pearse Museum expands on the background of this case and the fate of those involved.

‘We’ve seen the Pillars tumble’[1]: The fall of James Pillar

At the start of 1884, 63-year-old James Pillar appeared to be the model of Victorian respectability. Originally from Co. Tyrone, he ran a successful grocery and wine merchant business at 56 Rathmines Road. A committed member of the Quaker community in Dublin, he was married with three children and lived in a comfortable home in Palmerston Park. By the end of that year however, Pillar’s life lay in ruins. A bitter political war between the Home Rule movement and the British administration in Ireland inadvertently led to his exposure as a leading figure in Dublin’s secret male homosexual community. The resulting scandal proved devastating for those caught up in it.

Despite the fact Charles Stewart Parnell, the head of the Home Rule Party, had reached an agreement with the Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone in 1882 to work together to achieve Home Rule for Ireland, relations between Parnell’s movement and the British administration based in Dublin Castle remained deeply antagonistic. Parnell’s own newspaper, United Ireland, was edited by William O’Brien M.P. and was fiercely critical of the way Ireland was ruled, and used its columns to make bitter, and often personal, attacks on those involved in the administration. Dublin Castle responded with numerous attempts to supress the newspaper and prevent its distribution. It was against this backdrop that another Home Rule M.P., Tim Healy, decided to use the columns of the United Ireland to attack members of the administration on the basis of their private lives and morals.

One of Healy’s targets was James Ellis French, Director of Detectives with the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and County Inspector for Cork. Rumours had been circulating that he had sexual relations with other men, but Healy became the first journalist to allude to this in print when he linked French’s name with that of James Corry Connellan, a former Irish Inspector General of Prisons who fled the jurisdiction in the 1860s to avoid his own same-sex activities being exposed. French came under pressure from his superiors to sue for libel in order to both refute the charges and potentially destroy the newspaper with a ruinous financial judgement against them.

Faced with the prospect of his newspaper being sued, William O’Brien hired a disgraced former Scotland Yard detective named John Meikeljohn. As Meikeljohn began to investigate Dublin’s gay underground, he discovered that not only was French involved in homosexual activity, but he was also part of a whole network of gay men who were active in the city’s gay underground. It included people from every social strata, including George C. Cornwall, the Secretary of the General Post Office of Ireland. O’Brien now decided that, rather than retreat from the paper’s accusations against French reach a settlement, he would begin a campaign against him and Cornwall in print and depict them as emblematic of the moral corruption at the heart of Dublin Castle. By this stage French suffered what appears to have been a nervous breakdown, so it was Cornwall who ended up pursuing the libel case against O’Brien and the United Ireland.

The two sides met in the Four Courts on 2 July, 1884. Any hope Cornwall may have had of victory were quickly dashed when  O’Brien’s defence team produced three men who had been pressured by Meikeljohn into testifying about sexual encounters they had had with Cornwall. Over the course of the trial they also exposed a number of other men in their circle. Judgement was given in favour of O’Brien who was hailed as a defender of Irish purity in the face of the corrupt and degenerate British regime.

As bonfires burned in celebration of his victory, panic spread throughout Dublin’s gay community. Many of those who could flee Ireland did so, including Richard Boyle, a member of an Irish banking dynasty and a former head of the Irish Stock Exchange. Cornwall and French were arrested and sent to Kilmainham Gaol to await trial along with six other men, including James Pillar. The other accused men included two military officers,  Captain Martin Kirwan and Surgeon-Major Albert de Fernandez. Another man, Johnstone Lyttle, was a clerk, as were a number of the men who had agreed to testify against their former friend.  Robert Fowler and Daniel Considine were two poor and elderly men who were accused of engaging in acts of  buggery and allowing their tenement rooms on Golden Lane and Great Ship Street to be used by men for disorderly purposes. James Pillar was charged with a number of instances of committing buggery and it seems that, like Fowler and Considine, he also allowed men and male prostitutes to use his premises for their assignations.

The criminal trial took place in Green Street Courthouse and it is impossible to imagine just how humiliating and shameful it must have been for Pillar and the other men to have the intimate details of their private lives laid bare in a public court. However the trials also revealed a rare glimpse into the hidden world of gay life in Dublin in the 1880s. There were musical evenings in different men’s homes, parties in the tenement rooms of Considine and Fowler, trysts in St. Stephen’s Green, and sexual encounters in the Botanic Gardens. The extent of this activity suggests that the men believed, provided they used the utmost discretion, the authorities would not pursue them.

Malcolm Johnston, one of the men who gave evidence against the accused, described arranging a ‘drag ball’ where many of the male guests dressed as women. It was held in his father’s absence in his family home on Clyde Road in the wealthy suburb of Ballsbridge, and was attended by at least one clergyman from both of the main churches. He also listed some of the feminine nicknames the men used for one another. He was called ‘Conny’ or ‘Lady Constance Clyde’ or sometimes the ‘Marchioness of Dame Street’; Cornwall was ‘The Duchess’; Kirwan was ‘Lizzie’, while Fernandez was called ‘Mrs. F’. Robert Fowler was called ‘Ma Fowler’ and James Pillar was referred to as ‘Pa’ or ‘Papa’. Pillar’s nickname reflects the fact that he was one of the older men, but also perhaps that he had a senior position within the informal network.

Significantly, when the judge at Pillar’s trial, Mr. Baron Dowse, gave his summing up he made note of the fact that Pillar’s name was mentioned in the cases of all the other men, and it seems that he was a key figure in connecting the men with one other.

Initially, like the other accused men, Pillar pleaded not guilty. However, he seems to have had a change of heart and subsequently entered a guilty plea, the only one of the men to do so. As a result he was found guilty of just one felony charge of buggery, and all the other charges were dropped. He was sentenced to a life term of 20 years. Proving in a court of law that an act of buggery had taken place was incredibly difficult and Pillar was the only one of the men to be convicted of the more serious crime. French was given two years for conspiracy to commit buggery, while Considine and Fowler also received two years on charges of keeping a disorderly house. Why Pillar changed his plea is not clear, but given that he appears to have had a deep and genuine religious faith, he have decided to plead guilty as a sincere act of conscience.

Pillar served the first two years in Mountjoy before being later transferred to Maryborough (now Portlaoise) Prison. He would have been considered quite an old prisoner to be starting a sentence, and seems to have suffered from rheumatism and a number of other ailments. During his trial, the newspapers mentioned that he was a much older man, but he is also described as ‘fresh-complexioned’ and that he wore a brown wig and was ‘most respectably attired’. However in the mugshot taken of him on entering the convict prison system it is clear that the stress of the trial and public opprobrium directed towards him had taken a toll and he looks bedraggled and worn. His convict file records that, due to his age and state of health, he was later classified as being fit for only the lightest type of work suitable for an ‘invalid prisoner’. This included tasks such as sewing, darning and ‘teasing’ horse hair for use in mattresses. This is borne out by the one misdemeanor recorded against him, that he lent scissors to a fellow prisoner with whom he was working in contravention of the prison rules.

Pillar was married with three children, but his main correspondent and visitor during his time in prison seems to have been his son Charles Henry Pillar. Prisoner visits were severely limited at that time, and James Pillar usually received only one or two a year. Although his name was officially removed from the membership list of the Quaker meeting he attended, he seems to have retained some contact with his Quaker brethren. As he could not attend any Quaker meetings, he was given permission to attend the Presbyterian services instead. In 1890 he was allowed to read his own books, and these seem to include Quaker publications. Throughout this period his health remained poor, and there is a reference to him ‘a feeble old man showing symptoms of cerebral disease’, suggesting that he may have been developing some form of dementia.

He petitioned for release on the grounds of ill-health and, having served approximately half of his sentence, he was discharged on licence in May 1894. His wife Susanna, who was resident in their premises on Rathmines Road, had passed away in February that year. James Pillar appears to have settled in Co. Wicklow on his release but he died in Mercers Hospital in Dublin on 24 November, 1894.

 

Brian Crowley, Curator of Collections for Kilmainham Gaol Museum and the Pearse Museum

Twitter: @OPWkilmainham

 

Myles Dungan, Mr. Parnell’s Rottweiler, Censorship and the United Ireland Newspaper, 1881-1891 (Dublin, 2014)

Brian Lacey, Terrible Queer Creatures, Homosexuality in Irish History, (Dublin 2008)

Rictor Norton (Ed.), “The Dublin Scandals, 1884”, 13 March 2019, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1884dub.htm.

 

The Dublin Castle scandal’s “Unspeakable Crime” (1884)

[1] from ‘Hold Your Nose! A Collection of Sanitary Songs Intended for the Disinfection of Dublin Castle’ (1884)

 

Senator David Norris visited the National Archives on Tuesday 22nd June to mark the National Archives contribution to Pride Month. He was shown the records relating to his landmark case in 1988 at the European Court of Human Rights, David Norris V Ireland. Ref. NAI 2019/101/1171

The Department of Foreign Affairs files relate to the successful case he brought against Ireland’s criminalisation of certain homosexual acts between consenting adult men.  His case proved that the criminalisation of these acts was in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. This successful case led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland.

In 1977 Senator Norris had unsuccessfully taken the Attorney General to the High Court over the criminalisation of homosexual acts and appealed his case to the Supreme Court of Ireland. In 1983 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the existing law. David Norris appealed the Irish Court’s decision to the European Court of Human Rights in 1983 and this Court passed judgement in his favour in 1988. The laws impugned by the judgement were repealed five years later in 1993.

This week (7-11 June) is International Archives Week  with the theme this year of empowering archives. The campaign focuses on how archives empower accountability and transparency, through access to information for holding governments to account and ensuring that citizens can protect their rights.

Niamh McDonnell, Head of the Current Records Unit in the Archives and Government Services division of the National Archives, explains below how records management in government determines the archives of tomorrow and how robust legislation underpins accountability.

 

Many people are accustomed with the public facing work of the National Archives, but are less familiar with what goes on behind the scenes and how records are transferred to the National Archives in the first place. The release of records to the public in the reading room is the last link in a long chain that begins within government departments and agencies with the creation of the records.

In my role as Head of the Current Records Unit within Archives and Government Services Division (AGS), my main area of responsibility is to appraise records to determine whether they hold archival value and should be transferred to the National Archives after 30 years, or whether they should be disposed of once their business function has ceased in accordance with section 7 of the National Archives Act, 1986. This work can be very varied, reflecting the wide range of roles and functions across the civil service, and involves travel to locations where records are stored, including government offices and commercial storage providers throughout the country. It is work that requires strong attention to detail and a broad understanding of the work of the civil and public service, as many records created across government are inter-connected in some way, which may not be obvious to those now working in a particular area. This may arise for a number of reasons, including the transfer of functions from one department to another or the practical implications of the implementation of a particular policy. This work also requires experience of how archives are used by researchers and, most importantly, very good inter-personal skills as we need to be able to talk to individuals at all levels about how and why they create records and how they are managed over time. It is an incredibly important part of the archival process and one that we take very seriously.

As part of the appraisal of records, particularly those where disposal authorisation is given, it is important to create an audit trail of the entire process in order to justify the decision and to ensure that all aspects of the process uphold the principles of transparency and accountability. This involves a survey of the records and the writing of a report which is presented to the Director of the National Archives. Any final decision on the disposal of departmental records rests with the Director in her role as a statutory office holder. It is my job to make sure that the Director is fully informed of the background to the records, the functions they support and any other relevant details, which can often entail quite a lot of research or conversations with colleagues in departments and agencies who have created or manage the records. I’m frequently asked how you determine which records hold historical value. This is often impossible to answer as historical value is subjective and can change over time. When appraising records of government we use the underlying function of the records as the basis for how significant they are likely to be, while recognising that there will always be exceptions to any rule. Records across government are not created to fulfil an archival function, but to support a business function. Some functions such as policy development will create records, a substantial amount of which will hold archival value, while supporting administration or processing activities are likely to generate a higher percentage of records to be destroyed. Where records are identified for transfer to the National Archives, my colleagues in the Archives Management Unit of AGS take over and manage the process of transfer, cataloguing and making records available to researchers.

As civil servants we are governed by various legal frameworks. For departments or agencies, they will have legislation establishing their organisation and setting out their core functions, and may also be subject to other legislation depending on their area of work. This may be legislation applicable across the entire civil and public service, such as Data Protection or Freedom of Information Acts, or they may also have to comply with European legislation. For us in the National Archives, our establishing legislation is the National Archives Act, 1986, but we must also comply with our obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, 2014 and Data Protection Act, 2018.

Not all records created by the civil and public service should be retained permanently. On a practical level, it would be impossible to continue to accrue records from a storage point of view for both paper and digital records. From a legal perspective, it also places the State at risk, as it will not be complying with other legal obligations such as the retention of records containing personal data where derogation’s allowed for under article 89 of GDPR for archiving purposes in the public interest do not apply. A large part of my role over the past number of years has been to give guidance on records management issues. This has been particularly important since the enactment of GDPR and increased awareness of the risk posed to the unnecessary retention of certain classes of records.

There has been a lot of misinformation about how records containing personal data should be managed. Derogation’s for archiving purposes in the public interest, historical, statistical and scientific research were included in GDPR to reflect the fact that many records would become worthless if wholesale destruction were allowed based on no other reason other than they contained personal data, and without any consideration of the broader context in which the records were created. There is no such thing as a data protection issue, but an information management issue. Where information is managed in a coordinated way there should be little or no risk to an organisation, as the organisation will know what records they hold, on what legal basis they hold them and for how long they should be retained. These principles apply to any organisation regardless of whether they work within government or not. This life-cycle approach to information management ensures that records worthy of permanent preservation as archives are identified and protected to ensure they are transferred to the National Archives. It allows for resources to be put in place to ensure both paper and digital records are managed over time, and remain secure and accessible. It also ensures the organisation can identify records required in the event of a request under Freedom of Information legislation or a subject access request under Data Protection legislation in order to uphold the rights of citizens.

At present, the National Archives has no statutory role in records management within the civil and public service. This means that although we can give guidance, this does not need to be followed, with the result that many inconsistent practices have developed over time. This places the archival record at risk.

It has been 35 years since the National Archives Act, 1986 was introduced. Although this is a fundamentally sound piece of archival legislation, it does require review to take account of many of the developments that have happened in Irish society in the intervening years. Although the Act applies to both paper and digital records, it limits the scope by which the National Archives can intervene before records are 30 years old. At present, only Section 7 allows for early intervention where an application for disposal has been received. Without some oversight in how digital records are managed, it is inevitable that there will be gaps in the historical record. The Act pre-dates both the Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation. It also lists specific bodies in the schedule to which the Act applies, many of which no longer exist, with the result that many bodies created since 1986 have no legal protection for their records. The civil and public service has expanded dramatically over the past 25 years to reflect broader changes in Irish society. Archival legislation has not kept up with these developments.

On Thursday 24^th of June, the National Archives will host a seminar to begin discussion and interrogation of many of these critical issues in the context of wider international practice. Our speakers from Scotland, Denmark and New Zealand, all countries with a similar population to Ireland, will provide a really useful insight into the role their National Archives play in archives and information management within their public and civil services, and how they have dealt with the advent of technology and issues of data governance and access by placing their institutions at the centre of the debate.  See below for further information on how to book.

Seminar: ‘Protecting the public record: models of international best practice’ June 24

 

Niamh McDonnell, Senior Archivist, Archives and Government Services Division

This week (7-11 June) is International Archives Week  with the theme this year of empowering archives. The campaign focuses on how archives empower accountability and transparency, through access to information for holding governments to account and ensuring that citizens can protect their rights.

Antoinette Doran, archivist in the Archives and Government Services division of the National Archives, explains below how our work to uphold the principles of empowering through access the rights of the citizen continued in one of the most difficult periods of recent times.

Working in AGS (Archives and Government Services) during the pandemic.

 ‘Most archivists don’t like surprises. That’s why we work in the past.’

This is a quote from The Inner Circle, a novel by Brad Meltzer. I would say it’s a pretty fair summation of how many in my profession feel. There’s a comfort in working with old news, in knowing the outcome and looking back at the event from the relatively safe distance of at least three decades.

The surprise of a global pandemic is certainly not something any of us liked. I’m an archivist in the AGS (Archives and Government Services) section of the National Archives. If someone had told me at the beginning of 2020 that I would be working from home, unable to attend the office, consult the archives or see my colleagues, I would not have been able to envision how I could do my job. Yet one year on, and I’m now doing exactly that, still undertaking the work I once did, and finding new projects that can be done remotely.

The work of my division includes training staff from government departments and court personnel on preparing records for transfer; organising and checking annual transfers of records; preparing finding aids for the reading room and website; and organising the annual media preview. Some of these tasks can be done remotely, using video conferencing to undertake training, organising transfers by email, and preparing finding aids using our remote access laptops to work on our cataloguing software. However, there is no escaping the essential need to actually look at the collections. Incoming boxes need to be checked, descriptions need to be clarified, and reference codes need to be confirmed.

The records transferred to us in 2020, for public release in 2021, operate under the 30 year rule. These records usually arrive a couple of months before the media preview in early December. This allows us to check the lists, ensure all records are present, and undertake any repacking needed to enable them to be consulted by the journalists in December and the general public in January. This is a super busy time in our section but definitely my favourite time of year. We begin by looking back at the year being transferred, usually via a YouTube video of Reeling in the Years (although that may just be me!). It’s important to know what major national and world events dominated the news that year, so that we can look out for these as we are checking the files, and provide an overview of the general contents in preparation for their release.

1990 was the year we received in 2020 for public release this year. As an archivist, you know you are getting old when you actually remember events in the news from that year. Is 1990 really 30 years ago?! Alas it is, and we had some very interesting files to make available for release. Initially, we discussed whether it would still be possible to hold the media preview, putting in place appropriate safeguards and social distancing in our reading room. However, in the end it was simply not feasible to go ahead with the physical preview. The transfer of records from government departments requires a significant amount of work by them, including identifying, listing and packing the files for release. We were very happy to receive these files and felt strongly that we needed to make them available for journalists in some form.

The decision was taken to provide digital copies of a selection of files. In theory, this sounds like a straightforward task, but like all such tasks it’s never as easy as it first appears. In order to select the files for scanning, we had to look through the lists and identify potential files, then physically check each one to see if it was appropriate for scanning. This was my primary task, and one which I really enjoyed. I usually don’t get the opportunity to read through so many files and examine the wide span of subjects concerning the government during the year of transfer.

We then had to scan the files, which is a time consuming process to say the least. A significant quantity of the files contained hundreds of pages, and as these are archives, they must be treated with great care and attention whilst being handled. Our conservator assisted in developing our workflow and advised on the best course of action for tricky items within the files (of which there are always many!). Thankfully we were back in the office on a rotational basis at this stage, so we were able to devote our office time to scanning. In the end, we managed to scan 100 files in a couple of weeks and made them available to journalists on the 21^st of December.

Although there are many lessons we learned from this process, overall we were really happy to have made so many files available. It was rewarding to see them being used by journalists, as is evident by the RTÉ coverage at https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2020/1226/1186470-state-papers-1990/.  Despite the global pandemic, it is heartening to know that we can still continue to undertake the release of state papers, a fundamental part of our democracy which supports accountability and transparency. From our current position, there is something reassuring about looking back at 1990, a volatile and globally significant year that saw German reunification, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the beginnings of the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

To access the scanned files from the 1990 release please visit our website at https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/1990-annual-release-of-government-archives/

 

Antoinette Doran, Archivist