News reports reveal a growing stand-off between TCD and the people seeking the repatriation of human remains held in an anthropological collection in the college. In the first of two extended blogs, Ciarán Walsh gives some background and investigates a developing case of bad history.

160 people living on Inishbofin Island (population 170) signed a petition demanding the immediate return for burial of human remains Haddon and Dixon stole form a parish graveyard in 1890 and placed on display in TCD two years later. A further 611 people had signed an online version of the petition as of today (25 November, 2022). The comments of those who signed it say it all. Ann Burke wrote “These are the remains of my ancestors” and Mark Long wrote “My ancestors remains should rest in peace on their island, not on a dusty shelf in a museum after being stolen by their colonial overlords”.

John Burns (The Irish Times) and Sinéad Ní Neachtain (TG4) were the first journalist to pick up on the story as the petition circulated. TCD provided Ní Neachtain with a last-minute contribution to her report that included the following statement :

Trinity Provost Dr Linda Doyle said: ”We are ready and willing to address our multiple legacy issues and we believe it is important to do so in a manner that is evidence-based. This working group, alongside the work of our researchers, gives us a mechanism to do just that, regarding the issues that confront us now and those we will need to address in the future.“

The clear implication is that the evidence may or may not support repatriation of the Haddon Dixon Collection. that, of course, depends on the evidence submitted.

This is the line TCD has taken since the Provost set up a meeting between the repatriation campaign (attended by community representative and their supporters) and the Trinity Colonial Legacies team in September. Two months later, the Colonial Legacies team asked people who attended a public meeting it organised on Inishbofin to accept the evidence-based mechanism as the best way to resolve this issue. The people, 26 in number, responded with a unanimous show of hand demanding the immediate return of the remains of their ancestors, which they repeated and I made sure that the Colonial Legacies delegates understood that this was a a mandate from the people of Inishbofin to the Provost and Board of TCD.

The community representatives launched a petition (drafted by Pegi Vail of NYU) immediately after the meeting to ensure that their show of hands became a mandate from the island as a whole and the situation began to shape up as a stand-off between the people of Inishbofin and TCD. That situation is likely to worsen when TCD formally launches the Colonial Legacies ‘mechanism’ later today (November 25, 2022) and the petition becomes part of the evidence collected and fed into a protracted and very political process of internal decision making in the college.

This creates three problems. The first is that the Colonial Legacies team didn’t do a very good job of convincing the people that their process would result in repatriation. The second is that TCD will appear deaf to a unanimous mandate for the immediate return of the remains. The third is that it illustrates how TCD has consistently ignored evidence produced by repatriation campaigners and relied instead on a mix of assertion and factually incorrect information at the expense of credibility. 

That sounds harsh, but the statement released to Ní Neachtain is a good example. It stated that TCD is dealing “with human remains from Inisbofin [misspelt] associated with former Trinity-affiliated Professors Alfred C Haddon and Andrew F Dixon”. Haddon was never affiliated with TCD. That is a deliberate spin that is factually incorrect and the Colonial Legacies team should have known better.

Anon., Dredging party, 1885, with friends [plate 16] sitting, left to right: A.C. Haddon (in front of light suit), S. Haughton, W. S. Green, C. B. Ball; standing: Sir D’Arcy W. Thompson (light suit), Sir R. S. Ball (yachting cap), Valentine Ball (at end of trawl), 1885. Digital scan of silver gelatine print. Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA. This was the precursor of the Survey of Fishing Grounds, West Coast commenced in 1890 with Haddon acting as chief scientific officer during the second half of the survey.

Sure, Haddon, an Englishman who commuted to Dublin in the 1890s, set up an anthropometric laboratory and ethnographical survey in 1891 in association with Prof Cunningham, a Scotsman whom TCD appointed Professor of Anatomy in 1883 and he returned to Scotland in 1903. The Royal Irish Academy funded and managed the survey while TCD provided accommodation for the laboratory. Cunningham dropped Haddon from fieldwork after the first survey in 1892, probably because he was an anti-colonial activist who supported home rule. To summarise, Haddon may have associated with Cunningham but he was never affiliated to TCD.

A. C. Haddon and C. R.  Browne, Anthropometry in Aran, 1892. Digital scan and print of gelatine silver print. Digital scan and print (Tim Keeffe, Ciarán Walsh, Ciarán Rooney, 2011). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.

Another major error is evident in a statement Burns quoted in The Irish Times that the case of three Māori skulls and a skeleton TCD repatriated in 2009 was not ‘analogous’ because the Inishbofin remains “were Irish skulls taken by an Irish research team”. Haddon stole the ‘Irish skulls’ while working on a survey of west coast fishing grounds, which Chief Secretary Balfour organised in an attempt to stem Tory losses in swing constituencies in England in the run up to the 1892 general election.

Haddon was selling skulls in 1889 and Cunningham outbid the Hunterian in London for a large collection from the Torres Strait. Haddon donated the skulls he stole during the fisheries survey to TCD three years later and Cunningham displayed them in the Anthropological Laboratory, as the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory became known. This housed an anthropological collection and contained a case displaying three skeletons, one each from Australia and Oceania and, in between, the skeleton of the Māori individual repatriated in 2009.

Charles R. Browne, 1891, Dublin Anthropometry Laboratory. The blue tone of the photographs derives from the cyanotype or blueprint process. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.

The ‘Old’ Anatomy Museum TCD in 2014. Photo: Ciarán Walsh.

The ‘Skull Passage’ in ‘Old’ Anatomy in 2015. Photo: Ciarán Walsh

The case remains on display in the ‘Old’ Anatomy Museum and the gap in the middle points to the unethical nature of such displays. Yet, the Irish ‘specimens’ remain in their original display cases in the so-called Skull Passage and the School of Medicine TCD refused to release them for burial in August 2022.

With regard to the “Irishness” of the research, Haddon and Cunningham mobilised the laboratory to measure the skulls of ethnically distinct or unassimilated Irish communities in the west of Ireland as part of a general mobilisation within TCD in opposition to the break-up of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The campaign for home rule influenced everything that happened in Ireland in the 1880s and 1890s and Cunningham’s research is a good example.

For instance, Prince Edward (Queen Victoria’s favourite) and Garnet Wolsey, an extreme loyalist who commanded the British army in Ireland, acted as patrons of this new ‘public service,’ which Cunningham used to undermine home rule campaigns in the 1892 and 1895 general elections. He described the ‘uneducated and unassimilated “Irishman”’ as a danger to society and assured Unionists that, scientifically speaking, they were better fitted for survival than their home rule opponents.

The Anthropological Laboratory TCD in action on Inishturk Island in 1896. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.

The only Irish element in this campaign was the skulls Haddon stole and Browne measured. The Catalogue of the Anthropological Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin records them as Irish Cranium in the Haddon Dixon Collection. Carbon dating confirmed a median date of 1563, around the time that the English Crown attempted to overcome resistance by Irish Catholics to forced conversion. Resistance centred on monasteries which functioned as parish churches and folklore and history tell us that it was an honour to be buried close to the graves of saints like Finian, Colman and Brecan. Those graves were disturbed during later burials and the remains placed in ruined monasteries where taboo-encoded folk tales about the fateful consequences of interfering with skulls made sure that they were left alone.

The source: Inishbofin burial ground with St Colman’s Monastery in the background (photo: Marie Coyne, 2022).

In this context, the human remains in TCD embody the struggle against the colonisation of Ireland and there is a neat symmetry in the fact that they date from the same period in which Elizabeth 1 founded Trinity College as an instrument of colonisation through reformation. The Trinity Colonial Legacies team know all this. We discussed it inside the ruins of St Colman’s Monastery on Inishbofin on November 4, 2022 as I walked them through Haddon’s telling of the theft of the skulls.

So, why spin the historical facts that constitute the most important evidence in this case?

POSTSCRIPT

TCD issued its much anticipated statement on the Colonial Legacies project just before noon today (November 25, 2022). It is the same as that issued to TG4 last Monday, so this blog remains unaffected and the writer underwhelmed. The TCD statement is very short on detail, but one sentence jumps out:

Based on the evidence collated, the committee will provide options for consideration to the relevant decision-making authority.

Based on the evidence we have collected and presented to TCD on numerous occasions, the Haddon Dixon Collection can be defined as an anthropological collection of human remains stolen by colonial agents and, under article 7 of the legislative framework set out by the National Museum in its Policy on Human Remains, the repatriation of these remains is a right guaranteed by the Irish signature on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UN, 2007).

It’s a puzzle as to what options the new Trinity Legacies Review Working Group thinks it has other than acceding to the petition demanding the repatriation of the Haddon Dixon collection. This puzzle will be teased out in part two of this blog.