Irish Times Notes
Church of Ireland Notes from ‘The Irish Times’
The Somme Remembered
Highlighting the value of the Church of Ireland Gazette as a primary resource for historical research, the RCB Library in collaboration with the Gazette,commemorates the Battle of the Somme this month with a focus on how it was reported through the pages of the newspaper.
The battle began 100 years ago today and both the 36th Ulster and 16th Irish Divisions paid a heavy price. As early as the 14 July, the Gazette writing from ‘a little village on the north coast which has sent most of its young men to the firing line’ published a heart–breaking piece entitled “Ulster’s Sacrifice” recording ‘there is hardly a house where there is not one dead’.
The shared experience of unionists and nationalists fighting side by side at the Somme remains one of the most poignant Irish legacies of World War I, and in the first edition published after the battle began, on the 7 July, the Gazette highlighted this significance. Its lead article entitled “The Somme or the Boyne” was written in the context of government proposals to partition Ireland as a solution to the Irish question. Speaking for wider Church and island–interests as a whole, the article urged that all would remain united in the spirit of the Somme, rather than dividing along green and orange lines, thus promoting the Somme as a symbol of Irish unity.
The conciliatory tone of many of these articles may be attributed to the newspaper’s lay editor and wartime correspondent, Ware Bradley Wells. He was convinced that Lloyd George’s proposed partition or, as he put it: ‘the furtive plan for the dismemberment of Ireland’ represented potential disaster for all true patriotic Irishmen. Using the symbol of Ulster’s nationalists and unionists fighting alongside each other he appealed to his readers to make their choice for the real Ireland.
The content of Wells’s interesting editorials, his regular column “The War Week by Week” devoted to military aspects of the Allied offensive, the “Boyne or the Somme” series, and all the other content of the Gazette editions between 1911 and 1923 remains freely available using the online search engine available through the Church of Ireland website at www.ireland.anglican.org/library/archive
Additionally, with support from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, a second commemorative reprint of the 7 July 1916 edition of the Gazette – as it appeared for contemporary readers – will be printed and circulated for current Gazette readers on 8 July 2016.
Today (Saturday) in Christ Church cathedral, Dublin, the Chapel Choir of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, will sing Evensong at 5pm and, as the Christ Church Choir is on summer recess, they will also sing the services tomorrow (Sunday).
Tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon there will be an ecumenical Service of Commemoration for the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Rising in Cloonclare parish church, Manorhamilton, which will be attended by both Bishops of Kilmore and local church leaders. The address will be given by Dr Eunan O’Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History in Trinity College, Dublin.
In St Patrick’s cathedral, Armagh, there will be a recital by two American organists at 4.15pm. Nicole Keller is a faculty member of the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music in Berea, Ohio, and Timothy Olsen is Kenan Professor of Organ at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Summer Music 2016 continues in Sandford parish church, Ranelagh, on Friday when there will be a lunchtime guitar recital by Tomas O Durcain.
Church of Ireland Notes from ‘The Irish Times’