User:Andrew Gray/fire

The Four Courts fire of 30 June 1922 involved the destruction of part of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the start of the Irish Civil War, and resulted in the loss of a significant proportion of Irish public records and historical documents. The Four Courts complex in Dublin, which contained the Record Office as well as other government bodies, had been occupied by dissident groups of the Irish Republican Army aiming to force a military confrontation and wreck the Anglo-Irish Treaty; after a long standoff, the Irish government began shelling the building in late June. During the fighting, the storerooms of the Record Office caught fire, and were then destroyed by an accidental explosion.

Background

(material about the centralisation of Irish archives, etc)

Unrest in Ireland

(burning of government buildings, etc - tie together, culminating in Custom House as most prominent example, but not sui generis)

The Custom House was the centre of local government in Ireland, and was deliberately destroyed by the Irish Republican Army in 1921 as part of the Irish War of Independence, with the aim of disrupting British government.

Four Courts fire

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, was strongly opposed by some factions within the Nationalist movement.

(...explain history up to point of occupation...)

The Public Record Office occupied two buildings in the western wing of the Four Courts; the four-storey Record House, which contained a reading room, a library, and offices, as well as a strongroom for indexes and for records currently in use, and the Record Treasury, a high-roofed hall divided into bays, with a large basement, used for the storage of the records.^[1] The Treasury was well-suited to be used as a factory, and the occupying forces made use of it for preparing explosives and ammunition.^[2]

After a lengthy standoff, the Provisional Goverment forces, using borrowed British artillery, began firing on the Four Courts on 28 June, with little effect. On the 29th, government forces stormed and captured the eastern wing of the site, and the bombardment continued.^{[citation needed]} By the following morning, parts of the Four Courts were in flames, and this had begun to spread to the Treasury itself; early that afternoon, two explosions destroyed the building completely.^[3] The fire brigade had been turned out in the morning, and fought the fire for three hours, but was withdrawn after the explosions, which injured three firemen.^[4] The cause, number, and time of the explosions is a matter of some debate (...)^{[citation needed]} Attempts were made to fight the fire for

The main structure of the Treasury was gutted completely by the explosions and the resulting fires; nothing but the walls and some structural metalwork remained. While the vaults underneath remained structurally sound, the contents of one side had been completely burned, and the other side significantly damaged. The Record House remained mostly unaffected, suffering only blast damage from the artillery fire; the gap between the buildings had prevented the fire from spreading between them.^[5] The only material to escape destruction in the upper part of the Treasury was a small collection of parchment rolls, but these were badly damaged by fire, while in the basement vaults, a series of deeds stored by the Land Registry were recovered with only partial damage. Some documents had been removed to the Record House for research purposes, and were kept in the strongroom; they survived unscathed, as did a small number of bound volumes of wills which had been used as barricades in windows.^[6]

Affected records

The two fires, between them, destroyed or damaged a vast amount of material of historical and administrative significance. However, a substantial amount had been indexed, abstracted, copied or printed, and while the originals were lost these copies survived. Some more recent material escaped through not yet having been transferred to the Record Office.

Historical documents

The original Statute Rolls for Ireland, which had survived from c. 1400 onwards, were entirely burned. However, edited transcripts had been made up until 8 Hen. VII (1492-93), and printed copies of the statutes were extant from 1572 onwards, leaving only a sixty-year gap in the early sixteenth century.^[7]

Wood: Close Rolls, Patent Rolls, Justiciary Rolls, Pipe Rolls, Ulster King of Arms records (never transferred). Dublin municipal records (destroyed)

Administrative records

Wood: Registry of Deeds (survived in Tower), State Papers (mostly ditto), Probate Registries (most transcripts kept), Quitrent & Civil Survey (copies)

BMD?

Subsequent events

(new Irish archives, PRONI, recovery from UK sources, etc)

Notes

^ Wood, p. 33
^ Wood, p. 34
^ Wood, p. 35
^ Johnston, p. 33
^ Wood, pp. 35-6
^ Wood, p. 37
^ Wood, pp. 41-42

References

Wood, Herbert (1930). "The Public Records of Ireland before and after 1922". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fourth Series). 13: 17–49. doi:10.2307/3678487. JSTOR 3678487.
Johnston, Pat (December 1986). "Fire Fighting in Dublin to 1922". Dublin Historical Record. 40 (1): 26–33. JSTOR 30100775.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

[1] Wood, p. 33

[2] Wood, p. 34

[3] Wood, p. 35

[4] Johnston, p. 33

[5] Wood, pp. 35-6

[6] Wood, p. 37

[7] Wood, pp. 41-42

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