The private notebook of Bram Stoker has been discovered in an attic on the Isle of Wight, offering clues to the origins of his most famous work, Dracula. The notebook was found by the author’s great-grandson, Noel Dobbs. He sent a facsimile of the book to Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker, an author himself, who has deciphered his ancestor’s ‘terrible’ handwriting with the help of Dr Elizabeth Miller of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The Lost Journal, complete with annotations, is now lined up for publication by Robson Press next year, marking the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death in 1912.
Who knew there was another ‘dead zoo’? It seems that Dublin is not the only place with a natural history museum full of stuffed creatures. NUI Galway has its own museum, which has recently published an updated catalogue. Among its collection is a cuckoo known for its pungent odour, an Azara’s ‘false fox’ and 100 glass representations of marine mammals by the famous father and son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka of Dresden. Significantly, four of the museum’s items actually belonged to Charles Darwin and had been collected by him during his famous voyage on the Beagle. The collection is open to the public free of charge. See galwayscience.ie for details.
‘Mummy, please come home!’ is the plea of Egyptian authorities after the discovery of a mummy in University College Cork. The university’s Boole Library has a number of Egyptian artefacts but no record of how the mummy and its wooden casket came into its possession. More mysteriously, for a long time it was hidden under floorboards in the pathology department. The body dates from around 300 BC and is that of a middle-aged, well-off man who appears to have died from natural causes. Egypt wants it back to put into the new Great Egyptian Museum at Giza, which was designed by Dublin architects Heneghan Peng and is due to open in 2013. UCC say they’ll talk about giving the mummy back.
Next year the Olympics come to London, providing the chance for us to look into our own Olympic heritage. (There’s a special issue of HI in the pipeline for July/August 2012.) Louth County Museum, Dundalk, is currently researching a major exhibition highlighting the involvement of Irish athletes and officials in the Olympics from 1896 to the present day. The exhibition will open in summer 2012 and run for several months. Curator Brian Walsh is looking for assistance from the public in putting it together. He would welcome anecdotes and oral testimonies, along with items and memorabilia pertaining to Irish involvement in the Olympics in any way. If you think you can help, contact Brian or his colleague Anita Barrett at 042-9327056 or olympics@dundalkmuseum.ie.
Another Irish university has been in the news for helping to identify a lost Velázquez masterpiece. Put up for auction as the work of a nineteenth-century British artist, sharp-eyed auctioneers at Bonham’s thought it looked too good. They sent it to Velázquez expert Dr Peter Cherry at Trinity College, Dublin. After careful examination, he concluded that the portrait was the work not of Mathew Shepperson but of the great Spanish master. By Shepperson it was valued at around €600, but as an original Velázquez it is worth a tiny bit more . . . like €3 million more. So check those paintings hanging up at home. They may be worth more than you think!
A chilling insight into victims of the Great Famine has been revealed by the discovery of 970 skeletons in a forgotten burial site in the old workhouse in Kilkenny during excavations for a shopping centre in 2005. Since then they have been studied by Jonny Geber, an osteoarchaeologist. The study has revealed the range of people buried there, the types of diseases of which they died and their underlying health before the famine struck. The majority (56%) were children. An unexpected revelation was that most of the victims had scurvy and that this contributed to their deaths. Until now scurvy was not considered a major factor compared to typhus or tuberculosis.
Have you people no shame? Bad enough that statues and cables are stolen for the metal in them, but unscrupulous thieves have stolen a relic of the True Cross from Holycross Abbey, Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Masked men broke into the abbey and stole two crosses, both about 30cm in height and dating from the Middle Ages; one is silver with two dark stones and the other is made of bronze. The relic was donated in 1233 by Queen Isabella of Angoulême, the widow of King John of England. The thieves used an angle grinder, hammer and screwdriver to cut through the steel door of the cabinet where the precious relics were on display. We can only hope that they were stolen for a collector (in which case they might be recovered) rather than for their scrap value.
They’ve clocked up a lot of mileage in 100 years but that is how long one of Ireland’s biggest motor vehicle businesses has been going. Belfast-based Hurst Motors was founded in 1911 and now has thirteen outlets across the island, employing 800 staff. To mark the occasion they have produced an official history, which charts the company from its obscure beginnings to being one of the country’s most successful businesses. The book comes with a six-month warranty and free service for the first year.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1920 Five RIC officers and a Black and Tan were killed in an IRA ambush at Rineen, Co. Clare. The towns of Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay were later attacked in reprisal and at least five civilians were killed.
1970 Charles J. Haughey, Captain James Kelly, Albert Luykx and John Kelly were charged in the Central Criminal Court with conspiring to illegally import arms and ammunition. The jury was discharged on 29 September.
1989 Ten military bandsmen were killed and a further 22 injured when an IRA bomb exploded in the barracks of the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, Kent.
1989 Nine British army bandsmen and one civilian were killed when an IRA bomb exploded at the Royal Marine Barracks in Deal, Kent.
1918 Hanz Scholl, founding member of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who was executed in February 1943 along with his sister, Sophie, born in Forchtenberg.
1846 The luxury liner SS Great Britain, en route on her fifth voyage from Liverpool to New York, ran aground on the sands of Dundrum Bay, Co. Down, when her captain mistook the new St John’s lighthouse for the Calf light on the Isle of Man. Designed by the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843 to serve the burgeoning transatlantic passenger trade, she was the first liner to be made entirely of iron and powered by a propeller. Stuck in the sands, her 180 passengers, which included a girls’ choir en route to a concert tour in the USA, along with her 130-strong crew, were safely evacuated to shore with local help.
It would be eleven months before a successful salvage operation was mounted to rescue her. Under Brunel’s personal supervision she was stripped of what remained of her engines and everything else of any weight and her hulk towed back to Liverpool. And so began her best years. Sold in order to defray the cost of her salvage, she was refurbished with an extra deck and in 1852 made her first voyage to Melbourne with 630 emigrants after which, over almost a thirty-year period, she conveyed thousands from these islands to those shores.
In recent years, a team from the University of Bristol and the SS Great Britain Trust has identified the exact spot on Tyrella beach where she floundered—close to Ballykinler, where Ireland’s first mass internment camp would be constructed some 75 years later. Today, an upmarket restaurant in nearby Newcastle bears her forty cigars-a-day designer’s name and the old anchor displayed at South Promenade in the town is believed to have come from her.