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  • Shadows of the Dead:Harry Clarke and Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918
  • Marguerite Helmers (bio)

Ireland’s memorial records, 1914–1918 (1923) were published during the height of the postwar Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland, a period of burgeoning modernism among Irish and European artists and writers. Harry Clarke, the Dublin illustrator and acclaimed stained-glass artist who had recently made his reputation with his windows for Cork city’s Honan Chapel, accepted a commission to design a title page and nine decorative borders for these rolls of the Irish war dead. Following Irish Arts and Crafts practice, the title page for each volume was distinctly Celtic in its design, whereas the eight engravings repeated on the following pages of each volume demonstrated Clarke’s extraordinary syncretistic talents. In them he combined his documentary and imaginative renderings of regimental badges, heavy artillery, grenades, tanks and airplanes, the Virgin and Child, and a number of Christian saints, all within decorative knot work and scrolls. Privately funded, the publication of this eight-volume set by Maunsel and Roberts occurred during the early years of the new Free State’s recovery from a bitter civil war following independence. Inevitably, the project became part of ongoing Irish political debate about the appropriateness of commemorating another country’s war.

Commission

The Memorial Records volumes were commissioned in 1919, shortly after Sir John French assumed his position as lord lieutenant of Ireland (Johnson, “Spectacle” 44). In addition to his role as a commander on the Western Front, where Irish regiments served at the battles of Mons, the Aisne, and Neuve Chappelle, French maintained [End Page 7] a long-standing connection with Nevil Macready, one of the first army commanders to recognize the enormity of the task of recording burial locations of servicemen who died on the Western Front (Stamp 72). After the armistice Macready became an advisor to the new Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC),1 and shortly before the Irish Peace Day celebration in Dublin on 18 July 1919, French hosted a planning meeting at the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. There he proposed the creation of a national war memorial for Ireland—ideally a permanent structure that would house books of remembrance and become a site of contemplation for families of the dead and missing.

Principal nationalist leaders and many citizens opposed celebrations of victory and commemorative ceremonies for the Irish World War I dead. Among the ambivalent responses to commemoration were cases such as the “wild disorder” that broke out at a Peace Day celebration in 1919, when a group of students sang the revolutionary “Soldier’s Song” as a coda to “God Save the King” (Jeffery 115). Nationalists remembered not only Britain’s 1919 declaration of illegality of Ireland’s self-proclaimed first Dáil, but also the earlier executions, imprisonments, and raids that followed the Easter Rising. Many of those vividly recalled events, it is worth noting, had been ordered as reprisals by French in his position as commander of British Home Forces. The opposition to or absence from the celebrations by nationalists was a harbinger of how any commemorative efforts would be received in postwar Ireland.

Following a long period of dissent about the appropriateness of an Irish memorial to the First World War, only in 1938 did Ireland complete the British architect Edwin Lutyens’s design for a national war memorial featuring four bookrooms (Lutyens, Certification). Prior [End Page 8] to 1914 Lutyens had refurbished several Irish great houses in the Arts and Crafts style, principally private homes on Lambay Island and at Howth. He was also widely recognized for his war memorial work as one of three principal architects for the IWGC. The bookrooms were intended to display the Memorial Records in a memorial park serving as a space of beauty and contemplation (Lutyens, Drawings). For half a century, however, that elaborate park sat unused at its site in Islandbridge, where it was victimized by vandals and populated by vagrants until it was finally officially dedicated in 1988 (Leonard 66–67). A full set of the Memorial Records is currently displayed in the locked southeast bookroom of the park (figure 1).


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