‘BORN FROM FIRE’—THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE OF NORTHERN IRELAND AT 100
Published in Features, Issue 3 (May/June 2023), Volume 31By Tim Murtagh and Stephen Scarth
Above: D.A. Chart seated in the foreground of the search room of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin’s Four Courts before its destruction in June 1922. (NA)
This article, the fourth in a series arising from the ‘Beyond 2022’ project, marks the centenary of the birth of the PRONI in the aftermath of the Four Courts fire of 1922.
In June 1922, the opening engagement of the Civil War resulted in the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, located at the Four Courts. In one terrible afternoon, seven centuries of documents relating to Ireland’s history were lost. The Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) would endure and recover, finding ways to adapt and compensate for the loss of historical records, but the events of 1922 also loomed over the creation of a new archive—one taking shape in Belfast.
Under the terms of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, the island had been partitioned with the creation of Northern Ireland, encompassing the six north-eastern counties. The Act had included provisions for a separate Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). The necessary legislation for establishing the PRONI received royal assent on 22 June 1923. While modelled closely on the earlier English and Irish Public Record acts, the Act that created the PRONI also took into account the extensive loss of records that occurred in Dublin in 1922. Its wording was deliberately broad so that the PRONI could receive records from government departments, local authorities and non-governmental archives in private possession.
SIDNEY CHARLES RATCLIFF
The fledgling government of Northern Ireland sought advice on how to set up this new archive and requested the assistance of Sidney Charles Ratcliff, an Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office in London, who agreed to come to Belfast for several months. Ratcliff was no stranger to Ireland, as he had previously worked in Dublin for the PROI. Following the calamitous fire of 1922, Ratcliff visited the burned-out Four Courts and later published an early description of the scene he witnessed at the Record Office, including the vaults which had survived the blaze but whose records were ‘reduced in every case to a little white ash’ (‘The destruction of the Public Records in Dublin’, Bulletin of Historical Research (1924)).
Ratcliff’s contribution to the PRONI was considerable. He designed the structure of the office and proposed a scheme for the classification and arrangement of records. He drafted search-room procedures, created copying procedures, compiled lists of books needed for the reference library, devised arrangements for the payment of fees, designed the seal of the office, and produced lists and schedules of documents in the Crown and Peace Offices that could be transferred to the PRONI. Ratcliff was aided by a man who was pivotal in the story of the PRONI, David Alfred Chart.
CHARTING THE FUTURE
Above: The PRONI’s current premises on Titanic Boulevard, Belfast.
David Chart was a child of empire. Born in 1878 in Lucknow, India, to a father in the British military, he was educated in Cork and Dublin before joining the civil service in 1902. He gained his first experience as an archivist in the State Paper Office in Dublin Castle, before transferring across the Liffey to the Public Records Office at the Four Courts. While in the PROI, he was in charge of the public search room, as well as helping to index the 1851 census for Dublin City.
Following partition, Chart made active approaches to the Northern Ireland government in November 1921. As a Protestant unionist, he may have found the new Free State unappealing. He would also have been aware of the clause in the Government of Ireland Act that provided for the creation of the PRONI. While the Northern Ireland government was eager to attract civil servants from England, a number of staff from Dublin were ‘loaned’ to new departments in Belfast. Chart was among these, and in the process was promoted from ‘administrative officer’ to ‘principal officer’, a considerable step up. Assigned to the Ministry of Finance, he was initially in charge of the teachers’ pensions branch. Despite these duties, he had a hand in shaping the new Record Office, being instrumental in procuring the aid of Sidney Ratcliff in 1923.
It was Chart who was appointed as head of the new archive in late 1923, designated as the ‘Deputy Keeper of the Records’ (the Minister for Finance was technically the Keeper). He argued that the new archive should do more than simply preserve new legal records or the documents produced by the new state’s government departments. Obviously such records were important, but he argued that the PRONI should also seek out historical materials relating to previous centuries and to encourage a sense of the history of Ulster (or at least six counties of it), which the new government was keen to promote.
The PRONI opened to the public on Monday 3 March 1924. As a temporary measure, the Record Office was accommodated on the fourth floor of a disused linen warehouse in Murray Street, Belfast. The new archive benefited from a number of recruits with substantial experience with Irish records, arising from their previous employment in the Record Office in Dublin. This was particularly fortunate given that only about 300 civil servants in Dublin had transferred north after partition. These included Chart’s second in command, Edward Heatly, whose role in the PRONI has never been fully appreciated. Heatly was in charge of much of the day-to-day business of the archive and he would eventually succeed Chart as Deputy Keeper in 1948. As one of his colleagues would recall about Heatly: ‘All the real work that was done here from 1924 to 1955 was done by him, he worked harder than anybody else in the office’.
PLUGGING THE GAP/BACKFILLING HISTORY
From the beginning the PRONI focused on bringing in the private archives that would plug something of the gap in evidence created by the Four Courts fire. This initiative won backing not only from Hugh MacDowell Pollock, the minister responsible for the PRONI, but also from the Crown’s representative in Northern Ireland, the Duke of Abercorn. Abercorn, in addition to donating his own family papers, encouraged the landed gentry and families with a long history of government service to deposit their family archives with the PRONI. Meanwhile, Chart ensured that advertisements were placed in newspapers in 1924, asking the public for deposits. Bringing in private records also meant going to solicitors’ firms, businesses and organisations of every type across Northern Ireland. It meant persuading private individuals and families to give their archives to the PRONI.
The new archive’s search for records extended beyond Northern Ireland. The first documents received were two estate maps of Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, given by a Dublin firm of solicitors. Starting in 1927, the archive also began purchasing manuscripts, although its budget was initially only £25 a year. It benefited, however, from taking possession of records from the Belfast Registry and the Armagh District Registry, which recorded wills and matters of probate, as well as accessioning the Crown and Peace records from Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh and Londonderry. For those interested in the story of local government, such as the functions of county grand juries, the PRONI also became a crucial resource, housing a range of grand jury records from presentments and warrants to various lists of officials.
Chart contacted archives and libraries outside Northern Ireland, in many cases acquiring copies of material held by these repositories, to allow for easy consultation in the PRONI. He also made overtures to archivists in the Public Record Office in Dublin, who were rebuilding their own collection, ensuring that records relating to Northern Ireland were forwarded to the PRONI.
Information was obtained about records that related to the province of Ulster, and documents were frequently copied and transcribed from repositories such as the Bodleian Library, the Scottish Records Office, Trinity College, Dublin, the Armagh Public Library and the Lambeth Palace Library, to name just a few. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Chart sent transcribers to the larger British archives to produce transcriptions and extracts of records that he felt were relevant to the story of Northern Ireland. For example, PRONI transcribers produced an impressive series of typescript calendars of eighteenth-century Irish State Papers held in the Public Records Office in London, with the volumes covering the years 1715–60. Meanwhile, the archive was also gradually acquiring the work of various transcribers and ‘record agents’ who had worked in the PROI in Dublin before its destruction, bringing in collections like the transcriptions and notes of Tenison Groves, as well as those of various antiquarians and local historians.
The success of Chart’s campaign meant that, before long, the PRONI needed more storage space. In April 1933 the office moved to a new central Belfast location, the first floor of the new Royal Courts of Justice in Chichester Street. Despite fears that the archive might be damaged by the ‘Belfast Blitz’ during the Second World War, the records emerged unscathed.
David Chart retired in 1948, but the archive that he had done so much to create was secure. The PRONI moved into its first purpose-built premises in Balmoral Avenue in 1972, before subsequently moving to its current site in the Titanic Quarter in 2011. Throughout the archive’s century of existence, subsequent deputy keepers and staff have continued to expand on Chart’s vision, including his quest to redress the catastrophic destruction of records in 1922.
THE PRONI AND THE VIRTUAL RECORD TREASURY OF IRELAND
Since 2016 the PRONI has been a Core Partner in the Beyond 2022 Research Project, which last year launched the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland—a digital reconstruction of the destroyed Public Record Office of Ireland, bringing together replacement records from a host of archives and libraries, including the PRONI. This free on-line resource was launched on the centenary of the fire at the Four Courts on 30 June 2022. Through the Virtual Treasury, users can explore a growing selection of items from the PRONI and beyond, rediscovering documents once thought destroyed by the fire of the Civil War. The PRONI’s involvement with the Virtual Record Treasury continues to deepen, and its remarkable collections of family papers now form the centrepiece of an initiative to reconstruct the archives of the Irish Chief Secretary’s Office.
Meanwhile, as the PRONI approaches its own centenary, it is launching a celebration of its history. ‘PRONI 100’ is a year-long programme of engagement commencing in April 2023 and running until March 2024. It will incorporate events to mark the PRONI’s establishment on 22 June 1923 and subsequent opening to the public in March 1924. The strengths of the archive will be highlighted across the year through 100 ‘Treasures of PRONI’, and each month will be individually themed. The PRONI may have been born from fire, but its success is a testament to the enduring power of records.
To find out more about the work of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland and to explore the reconstructed archive, visit https://virtualtreasury.ie/.
Tim Murtagh is a research fellow with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland; Stephen Scarth is Head of Public Services at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Further reading
E. McKee, ‘The origins and development of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1922–1948’, Archives and Records 40 (2) (2019).
C. Wallace & M. Willis, ‘Charting the future of the past: D.A. Chart, the first Deputy Keeper of Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland’, Archive Fever 7 (September 2018).
H. Wood, ‘The public records of Ireland before and after 1922’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (4th ser.) 13 (1930).
