Through a Glass Darkly: The Archive and the Imperfect Portrait of a Man

In this blog post, Hannah Kempel, a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare & Medicine in Society, reflects on her personal responses to archival material relating to Dr Neil John Blayney (1874-1919) donated to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's Heritage Centre.

There’s a certain intimacy to archival documents, one that I’m not sure that I fully grasped before taking up this project. I had never really interacted with archival documents as part of a collection before. What little experience I had was in individual documents, either provided to me by professors or in database searches. The experience of interacting with a single archival collection is markedly different: deeper, more intimate, and more emotional.

We don’t always consider the emotional element of interacting with archives, but that has been my strongest response to this collection. Emotion in historical practice is controversial but useful. While some academics may believe it to be unnecessary or improper for historians, it can help us to move past our gut reactions and preconceived notions and draw out new understandings.[1] Beyond its use to the historian, empathy can also provide a way for us to engage more ethically with our sources.[2] We can treat our subjects as people with their own voices, not objects.[3]

This particular collection, the Neil John Blayney Collection at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) Heritage Centre archives, only concerns one man: the eponymous Neil John Blayney. Far from being the calm and objective historian, I had many different feelings while sifting through Blayney’s documents: humour, annoyance, admiration. I was quite surprised by the depth of what I felt. My strong emotional response inspired me to dig deeper into Blayney’s experiences and motivations and provided me with a richer and wider experience.

Background 

Dr Blayney, date unknown. Used
with permission from the RCPI Heritage Centre.

Dr Neil John Blayney was born in 1874 to a merchant family, the sixth of seven children.[4] He studied Greek, Latin, and English at the Royal University of Ireland, medicine at the Catholic University, and began practising as a doctor in 1897.[5] He would serve in a variety of roles as a surgeon during his life: from ship’s surgeon on a cargo and passenger ship [6] to resident surgeon at the Queen’s County Infirmary [7] to Medical Officer to the Maryborough Barracks during the First World War.[8] He married Eily Meehan in 1916 and had a daughter named Mary ten months later.[9] His son Andrew was born in 1918.[10] Blayney died in 1919.[11]

These are the barest of facts of Blayney’s life. They read more as a resumé than a biography and tell you little to nothing about what kind of man Blayney actually was. There is so much more to Blayney’s life, as there is for any person’s life, than the bare facts. Neil J. Brennan, Blayney’s grandson, took Blayney’s documents and pulled a much more colourful portrait of the man in his book Opening Dusty Boxes: The Life of a County Surgeon in Edwardian Ireland. His Blayney is an individualist who involved himself in politics and enjoyed playing football. He learned about these aspects and more from photographs, news articles, letters, and the inferences that he could make from what documents survived.[12]

Constructing Dr Blayney

How do you pull the person from the papers? There are almost one hundred items of Blayney’s in the Neil John Blayney Collection at the RCPI Heritage Centre. This collection consists of five categories of documents: those relating to his medical career, his personal life, his service in the First World War, medical records, and supplementary material collected by Neil J. Brennan.[13] At first glance this may seem rather comprehensive, but can one hundred items really encapsulate a person’s life? Twenty-six of those items are professional references.[14] Over a quarter of Blayney’s documents are written about him in a very specific professional context. What does that have to say, if anything, about who Blayney was?

In the book An Eye for Eternity Mark McKenna tells the story of Manning Clark, a famous Australian historian, and his wife Dymphna. Beyond telling the story of an influential man and his oft-overlooked wife, McKenna also digs deep into Clark’s self-conscious shaping of his own legacy through meticulous editing and choosing of his own documents. The sheer amount of records and the meticulous detail with which he documented and deliberately chose them indicate a great deal of effort was involved in Clark’s creation of his archival legacy.[15]

The question of what makes it into an archive and what does not can be quite fascinating. This can be a matter of policy, of concrete guidelines that lead to documents’ inclusion or exclusion from archives. For example, the RCPI Heritage Centre has a specific collection policy that is used to determine whether or not it will accept a donation, restricting its content to materials related to the history of medicine in Ireland.[16] The National Archives of Ireland goes one step further. Its policy is based on the National Archives Act of 1986.[17] What can or cannot be included in that archive is a matter of law.

Personal collections are somewhat different. An archive may choose to acquire them or not, but their creation is much more intimate and subjective than a collection created due to policy or law. Personal collections reflect the decisions and motivations of their creators. Manning Clark created his archival collection through a great deal of effort and time. He involved his family, especially his wife, in its creation.[18] Mark McKenna sees this management, which is interwoven into Clark’s biography, as Clark’s way of creating a second life for himself.[19]

Self-management and Self-reflection

The case of Manning Clark is in many ways an extreme example of managing one’s legacy. Clark was a historian who made his life’s work out of digging through papers in archives. He would have had a much wider understanding of the ways that personal documents can change and shape a legacy than Neil John Blayney, a county surgeon, might have had. This doesn’t mean that Blayney did not have a hand in creating his own archival collection.

Blayney’s collection has had a very different life than that of Manning Clark’s. By the time Clark created his collection and sent his documents to the Australian National Archive he was already a celebrity in Australia. He seems to have very explicitly desired to be written about in the future. He even left notes to future biographers in his diary.[20] Clark was desperate to be remembered. The Blayney collection’s path has been more circuitous. It was kept in the Blayney family’s possession, not as an archival collection used for research but as a set of “very dusty boxes” passed down to Dr Neil J. Brennan who donated it to the RCPI Heritage Centre.[21]

It doesn’t seem that Blayney ever planned for his documents to form a legacy for himself- at least not in the way Clark envisioned. Given that he died of a stroke at the age of 44 he likely didn’t foresee the end of his life any time soon, not like Clark’s anticipation in his old age.[22] This is not a collection borne out of a lifetime of study and management. We can then look at Blayney’s papers as a reflection of the documents he wanted to keep for himself, not for posterity.

What, then, did Blayney choose to keep for himself? Personal correspondence, handwritten notes, class notes, bills, letters of reference. Perfectly ordinary documents, the kind that anyone might have, that nevertheless reveal a life. Blayney’s papers reveal some of the twists and turns of his life and grant an insight into the practicalities of life as a doctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In diving into these documents one can reveal not just an example of the life of a middle-class county surgeon but the life of Neil John Blayney. 

“Regarding Our Last Correspondence” 

The Irish Automobile Club premises, present day. Source: The
National Inventory of Architectural Heritage.

One particularly interesting chapter of Blayney’s life concerns a series of correspondences between him and the Irish Automobile Club over the course of 1915.[23] A patriot, Blayney loaned his car to the Club for use in the transfer of wounded soldiers.[24] Unfortunately for both him and the Club, the car would soon break down and a dispute would ensue over the cost of the repairs. It’s a fascinating look into a personal dispute and proof of the old saying “no good deed goes unpunished”.

Blayney’s collection only contains the responses from the Club and a mechanic. He does not seem to have kept drafts of his letters in this case despite keeping other drafts.[25] As such we can only read the responses to whatever he wrote. The Club’s responses, mostly written by H.J. Clayton, appear more and more exasperated with whatever Blayney wrote them. The relationship between Blayney and the Club does not seem to have ended very amicably.

I bring up this case because it offers such an interesting glimpse into Blayney’s personality, yet Blayney’s own words are lost to us. The set of letters tell a particular narrative. The first letter profusely thanks Blayney for his contribution.[26] The next few letters give some details on the car’s breakdown within a month of the previous donation and discuss the Club’s inability to pay for repairs.[27] This begins a year-long dispute over who should pay for the car repairs.

This is a compelling sub-series for me. The letters, one-sided as they may be, tell a story of frustration on both ends. Blayney as viewed through Clayton’s letters seems frustrated with the Club for damaging his car, asking him to pay for repairs, and taking a long time in fixing the car. The Club, on the other hand, appears frustrated with Blayney for not paying and then leaving his car in their garage for a long time while the dispute was going on. There’s a certain sense of mundaneness in the letters, of a fairly common sort of argument over who should pay for something, even occurring as they did in the middle of a large international conflict. It’s such a human moment.

I had a very personal reaction to these letters when I first read them. James Lowry discusses this “affective response”, which he argues that users of archival material can employ in order to better “bear witness” to the people and events they are studying.[28] As I bore witness to this episode of Blayney’s life, I didn’t like what I saw. The letters in my experience of them do not paint Blayney in a very positive light. I found myself getting annoyed with him as I read the responses from the Automobile Club. Without Blayney’s own words to speak for himself, I could only view him through the words of an organization that he was in conflict with.

There is an archival concept called imagined records.[29] These are records that may have, could have, or we want to exist, but that we can’t find. We ascribe a lot of significance to these imagined records and we feel their loss. Imagined records can be incredibly personal for the person imagining them – creating their own affective response.[30] I’ve seen examples ranging from the medical records of a stillborn child to the records of colonised nations that were lost during decolonisation.[31] Compared to such painful events, some missing letters about car repairs may seem rather trite. Why compare them to much more important cases? Small instances can be used to conceptualise the wider problem – that archives can very rarely tell the whole story.

I can imagine the letters that Blayney sent. There are drafts of other letters and notes that he wrote in the collection.[32] From these I can piece out his writing style, his handwriting. I can guess some of the things that he wrote to the Club from Clayton’s responses. For example, Blayney seems to have wanted to know the details of exactly what parts of his car were worked on. There are several letters responding to his questions.[33]

I can’t know exactly what he said, however, and herein lies the trap. When I read the letters I felt annoyed at his imagined slights against the writers. Did that annoyance make me imagine his letters as more aggressive, more petulant than they might have been? Did I project my own experiences with similar disputes onto Blayney? This too I can’t know because I can’t read his letters. I can only imagine what might have been.

Mrs Blayney’s Medical Reports

Another item in the collection that fascinates me is Item 44. It’s a set of nurses’ reports from the first of November, 1918 to the thirtieth of the same month.[34] Mrs Blayney became sick and was admitted to the hospital late in her second pregnancy. A month later she gave birth prematurely to her son.[35] Blayney kept the nurses’ reports on his wife’s health in his personal records.

A nurse’s reports from the collection. Used with
permission from the RCPI Heritage Centre.

The reports detail Eily’s diet, her temperature, her medications, and even her urine. The majority of each page is bare, with only a few markings indicating what the nurses did. The last few pages are even blank but for some reason Blayney kept them anyway.[36] What does this say about Blayney, that he kept these records?

As a doctor, these records would make more sense to Blayney than to a layperson. These records could have had more value to him than someone who is not a doctor. But being able to read and understand a set of records is not the whole story. If Blayney had kept every set of medical records that he could get his hands on, the collection would be much larger than it is.

Blayney was not a meticulous record-keeper like Manning Clark. This means that there are fewer of Blayney’s documents that we can study, but conversely that also lends more weight to the documents that he chose to keep. If Clark’s collection is intentional and vast, Blayney’s is serendipitous and specific. His records seem to be confined to important documentation like income tax returns, professional papers, and items of personal interest. In which category would Blayney place the nurses’ records?

What were these thirty-three pages to Blayney? Important documentation relating to a family medical emergency? Perhaps, but likely not thought of in the way that he viewed an income tax return or furniture invoice. Something related to his profession as a doctor? Another document is a register of examination notes, so it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that he could have had a similar interest in keeping his wife’s nursing records.[37] However, Eily went to a different hospital than Queen’s County Infirmary, where he worked at the time.[38] These nurses’ reports would have had no direct bearing on his career. Blayney’s medical speciality also seem to have been tuberculosis, not what seems to have been pneumonia or influenza.[39] Or were these simply papers describing a difficult time in his wife’s life, made worse by the premature birth of his son shortly after her release?[40]

We can’t know for sure but we can guess. Perhaps we can see this as another very human moment. Blayney kept the details of Eily’s treatment in what was likely a very difficult time in both of their lives. Blayney seems to have cared about his wife, enough to push past his mother’s disapproval for their union.[41] It would make sense for him to be invested in her wellbeing. His exact motivations are not clear, but with this document we can approach a sense of the care that he felt for his wife and son.

This document is compelling for the questions that it raises. The archive can provide us with tantalising clues but rarely a smoking gun. Handed the concrete evidence of one man’s life I can only feel the weight of what is missing from Blayney’s records. Julia Laite wrote that “friendship… is so often missing from the historical record.”[42] Interpersonal relationships are often hard to pin down in the records we leave behind. We may be given clues but concrete proof eludes us.

   

Conclusion

While I’ve spent a good deal of words on what is missing from this collection, I’d like to spend a few more on what can be found. This collection is full of insights into the life of an average doctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Blayney’s papers were kept within his family’s hands for almost one hundred years before they were donated to the RCPI.[43] A lot can happen in one hundred years to a box of papers. Neil J. Brennan attributes the wealth of material still available to his mother and grandmother being “inveterate hoarders” and a great deal of thanks should be given to them for maintaining these documents.[44] I’ve spent a lot of time attributing quirks in the collection to Blayney’s choices, but Eily and Mary, Dr Blayney’s wife and daughter, deserve credit for their roles as family archivists. It is through their efforts that we now can study Dr Blayney’s life.

This collection is fascinating for its serendipity, both in what documents Blayney chose to keep and in its journey to the RCPI archival collections. The documents were far more likely to be destroyed or lost than to make their way into a traditional archival collection. Through this collection and other collections like it, we can see as if through a glass darkly aspects of the ordinary past that are so often forgotten. 

Hannah Kempel 

Hannah Kempel is a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare and Medicine in Society

 

1. Katie Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’, Rethinking History 22, no. 4 (2018), pp. 459-473.

2. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, ‘From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives’, Archivaria, 81 (2016), pp. 23-43.

3. Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’.

4. Neil J. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes (Ireland, 2019), pp. 1.

5. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 4-5.

6. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 18.

7. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 28.

8. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 53.

9. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 61.

10. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

11. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

12. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.

13. Caiomhe Rehill and Harriet Wheelock, ‘Neil John Blayney Papers’, RCPI Heritage Centre, pp. 1-30, accessed online, https://rcpi-live-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Neil-John-Blayney.pdf, 3 December 2021.

14. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 61-73, 75, 76, 78-88.

15. Mark McKenna, An Eye For Eternity (Carlton, 2011), pp. 32-33.

16. https://www.rcpi.ie/heritage-centre/donations/, accessed 3 December 2021.

17. ‘Acquisition Policy 2018-2022’,  An Chartlann Náisiúnta | National Archives, pp. 1-16, accessed online, https://www.nationalarchives.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Acquisition-Policy.pdf, 3 December 2021.

18. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 32.

19. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 553.

20. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 32.

21. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.

22. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62; McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 553.

23. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 45-57.

24. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 45.

25. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 13, 14, 90.

26. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 45.

27. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 46-47.

28. James Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives’, Archival Science, 19 (2016), pp. 193.

29. Anne J. Gilliland and Michelle Caswell, ‘Records and their imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined’, Archival Science, 16 (2015), pp. 53-75.

30. Gilliland and Caswell, ‘Records and their imaginaries’; Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records’.

31. Gilliland and Caswell,  ‘Records and their imaginaries’; Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records’.

32. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 13, 14, 90.

33. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 56, 57.

34. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 44.

35. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

36. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 44.

37. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 97.

38. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 35.

39. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 36-7; Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

40. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

41. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 60.

42. Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (2020), pp. 963-989.

43. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. ix.

44. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.