IT is a very long time indeed since I joined a march, but last month I walked with 100 or so writers, readers, library staff and book-club members following the rousing beat of the Band of the Southern Command on a route through Cork city. Last December 14th was the 90th anniversary of the Burning of Cork; one of the victims of the 1920 atrocity was the Carnegie Free Library, and our route went from the old Carnegie site by the City Hall on Anglesea Street to the Central City Library on the Grand Parade. It was a busy day in town as we strode over Parnell Bridge, into Parnell Place and filled Oliver Plunkett Street almost to the shop windows. It was exhilarating, seeing the crowds brought to a halt, watching the children waving at the band, noticing how many people were reading the explanatory leaflets distributed by our out-riders.
While the UK is embroiled in a cost-cutting process which seems likely to sweep away entire library systems Ireland – for which read Cork – is not yet in such deep trouble; City Librarian Liam Ronayne says that the non-replacement of staff and a 30 per cent cut in the purchasing fund have an impact, but can be tolerated, so far. However, the devastation in England and Wales provokes a renewed sense of responsibility to the enduring value of the written word. February 5th is scheduled as a UK Day of Action when readers, librarians and authors will mount “read-in” protests at libraries under threat, with writers such as Joanna Trollope leading the charge.
In contrast to the UK event, the Cork march was celebration, not mourning. We were marking not so much the destruction of the old building and its contents as the rebuilding of its collections. In his book Rising from the Ashespoet Tom McCarthy notes that out of the enormous catastrophe that enveloped Cork for months and even years after the inferno there was a phoenix-type re-growth. "A community tends to define itself most clearly in response to a crisis", writes McCarthy. "One thing that emerges strongly from the letters and donations of the early 1920s is the strength of bookish rather than merely literary, Ireland as an idea, a locus of identity."
Some few books were saved from the blaze, others out on loan at the time were brought back to a temporary depot and later to rented premises in Tuckey Street. Within days, librarian James Wilkinson, undaunted by the ruins of his building – which had recorded over 100,000 lending and reference users the previous year – began his work of restoration. On January 10th 1921 the first appeal for books was published with a rallying cry which reached around the world. ‘The destruction of a Library, large or small – whether it be in Alexandria, Louvain or Cork – always appears a crime against humanity, a violation of the sacred neutrality of the world of letters, art and scholarship. Our little library, with its 14,000 volumes, the slow garnering of 28 years, could lay no claim to valuable manuscripts of incunabula, though many of our Irish printed books were very rare . . . Our books are now in a heap of ashes, our Library but four bare walls.”
Even in normal times the library’s annual revenue was never more than £780; now Wilkinson could not compete with the more urgent efforts of the Cork Relief Committee, and directed his appeal for help in this “humanitarian reparation” especially to “all those who are members of the great world of Letters and Art”. They did not let him down. Bales and boxes of books began to arrive, including a donation from the internees at Bere Island in Co Cork (one of whom would shortly be Professor Alfred O’Rahilly of UCC, an important advocate for the library itself and a teacher who took the examination papers of his students with him for marking at the prison camp).
Delivery was complicated by the demolition of railway lines by the anti-Treaty forces; letters show the anxieties of donors – especially those from overseas, worried by the cost and uncertainty of postage.
R Lloyd Praeger of the National Library sent 300 books via Lennox Robinson, Robinson’s mother at Ballineen adding 56 more. Booksellers and librarians in Dublin and London (including Foyles) donated; books came from private homes and libraries from throughout Ireland, Britain and America, from the Apostleship of Prayer in New York, from Cambridge, from Dáil Éireann, from India and Venezuela, from Daniel Corkery and AE, from Mrs WB Yeats. Charlotte, Mrs George Bernard Shaw, was to become the largest single donor which is saying something, given that a Mrs McKee of Harpenden in London sent 1,149 books in all. A list of books on religion was submitted to the South Presbytery in Cork “with a view to your reporting any books which you consider ought not to be stocked . . .” Some donors got it wrong and just lent books; for those who got it right there was a special bookplate. President Warren Harding sent a message of support. By the autumn of 1924 Mr Wilkinson had a fully-functioning library again; in September 1930 the new library, costing £19,000, was opened. Within a year the stock outnumbered its pre-burning level and as it reached 15,000 items James Wilkinson went home to England leaving, as McCarthy writes, “his bequest to the constant readers of Cork”.