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A Westmeath Libraries podcast where we chat with a variety of local historians. We'll learn what started them on the path towards history and they'll share some gems of our local history collection
Lorna: Welcome to the Westmeath Libraries podcast. Today we are celebrating local history. We're very lucky to have a visit from Doctor John Gibney from the Royal Irish Academy, who will speak with Gearoid O'Brien, retired librarian and historian, about the prestigious Aidan Heavey collection, which is housed in Athlone Public Library.
Dr. John Gibney
The public library system retains exceptionally rare and valuable material. It's not necessarily always on public display but it is accessible to students and scholars and they are public resources. And I'm mentioning this because the one I'm thinking of right here and now is the Aidan Heavey Collection, housed at Athlone library, which, Lorna Farrell of Athlone Library recently gave me a little tour of. And I have to say, even at first glance, you just realize you're basically looking at a collection of national importance.
So as someone who's intimately familiar with it, Gearoid, I suppose, I might ask you to start and maybe just explain, like if we're going to talk about Aidan Heavey's collection, the question will be, who was Aidan Heavey? Why did he collect it?.
Gearoid O'Brien :
Aidan Heavey was a native of Athlone. He was in the textile business in Dublin. He had been a commercial traveler for Dwyer's of Cork for years. And then he set up a textile business, Heavey textiles in Dublin, and all the time he was collecting books. Now there were a triumvirate of book collectors; himself and his brother in law, Doctor Eamonn Norton, who's collection is in the University of Limerick, and Tadhg McGlinchey, I think he was with the Irish Academic Press. So the three of these went around collecting books. They did book collecting in Ireland and even took the odd trip to the States to look for, rare and unusual items. I knew Dr. Eamonn Norton very well, and I was lucky to meet Aidan Heavey back in, in about the 1980s, early 80s, possibly, when I brought a book from Doctor Norton's collection in Wakefield over to Aidan Heavey, and they were swapping books at the time.
And this book, I was warned, had the same value as a semi-detached house in Dublin. So I was rather wary of carrying it home. But it made me aware that Aidan Heavey had a really fine collection. And one of the things that I've been told about it was that he had a wonderful Goldsmith collection. So I suppose, my hope would have been to get to see this collection of Goldsmith material.
So, Aidan anyway, invited myself and our then County librarian, Mary Farrell, and our County Manager Anne McGuinness to a dinner in his apartment. And we knew there was something afoot. And I suppose at the time, we thought perhaps, we were going to be told that he was going to leave us his Goldsmith collection, which would have been a wonderful thing to get.
But anyway, we sat down and had a meal, and very soon we realized that he was talking about his whole collection. We had seen some of it in his apartment. He had two apartments, in the Mespil apartment block one for himself and his wife and books, and one for books exclusively. And the rest of the books were housed in Heavey Textiles.
So, the best he could say was that there might be about 20,000 items. And we realized that at the time, we were planning a new library and the county manager was very supportive of the idea, and we were going to make space for this collection. But until we had the whole collection brought to Athlone, we weren't really aware of just what wonderful gems were included in this.
Dr. John Gibey :
I suppose, the mentality of a collector or, I mean, with archives and collections, you know, you kind of have to think of why they were brought into existence in the first place. You know, why did someone? Why was it generated or why was it created? Because it wasn't necessarily created for the likes of yourself or even myself to come along and look at it. So is it just books? Like what kind of things did Heavey, what did he focus on, what were his interests?
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah, he very much focused on books, but there are some other ephemera and materials included in the collection. But, I suppose the collection, first of all, in ways, reflects his own particular taste, because, Goldsmith was somebody who seems to have been very important to him and his collection of Goldsmith is probably of international importance. But he also had other favorites, like Oliver St. John Gogarty, he collected letters and books and signed copies and you name it, from Cogarty and Jack B Yeats of course, he was very fond of him, and collected quite a lot of that material, but he was also very friendly with Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press, and he put together a collection of Dolmen Press material, which is hugely impressive. It probably contains everything except two or possibly three items, that were published by the Dolmen Press and some of them in very limited editions. And I believe that it is a better collection than Liam Miller's own collection, which ended up being sold to an American university and other particular interest areas were Douglas Hyde and the Coola Press and the Dun Emer Press. But he had a very broad general interest in Irish material, and he was quite selective about what he was buying.
And he looked at tours in Ireland, topographically material, but he also, he left no area out. If he came across a good collection of material about Irish military matters or British regiments that served in Ireland or something. He would say, well, that's a gap. I haven't got that, so I'm going to buy that.
So he I suppose he had the resources, when books were not as expensive as they became later. So he was buying over a long period and buying at auction very often and would come across a collection that maybe somebody else wouldn't appreciate how important was.
Dr. John Gibney :
Was he quite discerning in terms of quality? Like I mean, you mention a complete set of the Dolmen Press and that's, you know, nationally important, but then figures like Goldsmith and Douglas Hyde and these are, you know, figures of major, major importance in Irish history. But would he focus on, would you just try and get everything you could possibly could? or just look for the good stuff?
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah. With his favorite ones, Certainly. And generally with books and books in general. Aiden spent the majority of his time dealing with his books. He was very familiar with the contents of the books, but also with, with Goldsmith, for instance. And he was looking for first editions. He would have, I think, given his right arm for a signed copy of Goldsmith. He didn't manage to get a signed copy, but he did get one, I think, as an inscription from memory. It was something like, "to Charlotte Walsingham, a gift of the author", but unfortunately it wasn't signed. But then at some point, in the 80s, I think late 70s or early 80s, he saw in an auction in England, the front of an envelope that had been left into a pub by Goldsmith to be collected by a friend, and it was signed Goldsmith and so he decided he had to have that. And so that's kind of an, an example of and he also bought the lease of the house that Goldsmith lived in, in Lissoy outside Athlone. And he bought a copy of the lease signed by Goldsmith's father. So these kind of items, when they came up, as far as Aidan was concerned, money was no object. This was something that help to make his Goldsmith collection unique and hugely important to a scholar. So he had his eye on good, good material, always looking for the first editions, looking for signed copies or association copies. And, when he got the books, then he if, if they needed to be rebound. He was very sensitive as to how this should be done. If they were anyway fragile, or extremely rare he'd get a box made for them. And generally his books were in immaculate condition. And, you know, he went through stuff with a soft rubber to remove little stains of pencil marks and what have you, and little pamphlets, and that he always made a little, very often made a little wrapper for them that would protect them. So, and the one, I suppose the one thing that impressed me, very much when we got the collection first, was that he was hugely familiar with everything that was in the collection, which is unbelievable with 22,000 items, which was what I think we ended up with.
Dr. John Gibney :
I mean, one thing that, you know, it just struck me from just having having a glance at it and I was walking around all goggle-eyed thinking, this can't be real, you know, like the quality of the stuff. But, I mean, you've mentioned there's those big ticket collections, we might come back to them in a little while, but if you were to do like, a whistle stop tour of, I mean, what are the eye-catching material and not necessarily your own favourites? But if you were like, what kind of stuff down there would you turn around to someone like me and say this is really important. This is really something else.
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah, there's no end to it. You keep finding more things that you say. Yeah, these and the library are very good at the moment about doing occasional exhibitions. I think every month, as far as I can see, they have something new on display upstairs in the adultlibrary. And, you know, he had a huge interest in 1916 material.
He obviously had a huge interest in this because he ended up with all kinds of rare gems from 1916. And you asked me, did he collect things other than books, he collected little matchbox covers, little little enamel matchbox cover that was brought out to commemorate Tomás MacDiarmida. He collected Tomás MacDiarmaida material and had signed copies.
He had even proofs corrected by Tomás MacDiarmaida, and I think he may have had letters from MacDiarmaida, but he also had letters from Padraig Pearse. He had material from Joseph Mary Plunkett, and very nice copies signed by Grace Plunkett. These people just seemed to fascinate him. And if he saw something coming up on the market, he bought it.
You'll remember when you were, well when I was a child maybe they were gone by your time, you could buy a little flag to support some charity. And there were very often on a pin. And he has a pin with, Padraig and Willie Pearse on it.
And it was collecting money for Scoil Éanna. Probably about 1916, 1917, I think. And he has preserved in a little box. So, I mean, he looked for some items like that, but I would say that more than 99% of the collection is books, or occasional manuscripts. He ended up with an absolutely fabulous collection of maps from the Gregory estates, connected with Lady Gregory, and I think that's what attracted him to it, because he had already been collecting Lady Gregory as part of the Coola Press material, and he had signed and association copies, some from Lady Gregory, some signed for Lady Gregory.
And then he got the chance to buy the estate maps of the Gregory estate in Galway. I can't remember the dates off the top of me head, but they covered a 70 year period up to about the 1820s, 1830s, I think. And they're just wonderful. A one-off item and that's something that, as with all Landed Estates, you know, records it has details of tenants, it has little maps drawn in it. I had shown it to a chap from Galway, a local historian there. And he was even saying that in some of the cartouches there were pictures of a little church and he said that church is not there. We didn't know what it looked like, you know. So it's an unexplored mine really, there is so much there to be still to be discovered.
Dr. John Gibney :
And I mean, it struck me that it's not just... I mean, there were two things that struck me about in terms of the books. One is that there's treasure trove, even aside from all the material of historic interest, that you're outlining. There's a huge repository of Irish historical writing of the past century, like, I mean, even if you weren't interested in Goldsmith or Douglas Hyde, or the Gregory family, you could go in and it's just an extraordinary collection of books, full stop. And if you went back further it's not just the books, it's not just, you know, Irish historiography, but there's some really old and rare books that are beautiful artifacts in and of themselves.
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah, He was very fond of early printing of Irish interest. So he has books from, the late 16th century up to 1800, a collection about 170 rare books in that. He also collected and was very conscious of, you know, of quality bindings. So if he saw a first edition of Goldsmith that was in a very fine binding, he was quite prepared to go, and bid quite a lot of money to get that, because it was a nicer copy than something that he might have had.
And I think even with, with himself and Eamon Norton and, Tadhg McGlinchey, they sometimes swapped and bartered books among themselves. And I suspect that the one I brought back from Wakefield for him was something that Eamon Norton maybe needed money to buy something else, and he decided to trade this book with his brother-in-law's art Aidan Heavey.
And Eamon Norton would stand back from a Goldsmith item id Aidan Heavey wanted it. But likewise Aidan would stand back from other material that Eamonn Norton might want.
Dr. John Gibney :
Suppose its good to hear that, you know, book collecting isn't a cutthroat world, scope for give and take. Like, you're very familiar with it, you know, you're probably the individual person most familiar with the collection since it was deposited here at the library, obviously Aidan Heavey's passed away, but what would your favorites be?
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah, well, I don't know. I find the, Joseph Mary Plunkett material very moving because, you know, he was married one day before he was executed. Just over night. I think he was married in the evening, and he was executed the following morning. So a material like that with with a letter from Grace Plunkett in it, that's very moving type of stuff. And it would it would certainly appeal to me.
On a local level one of the things that fascinates me is, the poet laureate, John Betjeman spent a bit of time in Ireland with the diplomatic service and he visited Westmeath. He came to stay with the Packenham family in Tullynally Castle, and he saw a book, I think it was the Grand Juries of Westmeath if I'm correct. And he saw a bit of a story about Belvedere and all that area, and he wrote a poem about it. He got it published by the Westmeath Examiner in Mullingar. I think this was about 1936 or 38. And he got it published, printed by them very limited edition, written under a pseudonym. And Aidan has a lovely little copy of it. Now, a rarity like that is something that just appeals to me hugely.
Dr. John Gibney :
If you were to rank the collection locally or nationally and internationally, what status would you give the Aidan Heavey collection?
Gearoid O'Brien :
I'm sure you know, of Fonsie Mealy. He's a book auctioneer in Castlecomer and Fonsie Mealy has been in this business for donkey's years. And he actually transported the material to Athlone. And then he was very keen that when it would be put up on the shelves that he'd get to see it, and in fact, until it was put up on the shelves in Athlone in the library, Aidan Heavey himself had never seen all his books together before, so he was taken aback by just how much, the quantity and the quality of what was there.
And it was kind of, my God, there are all these, my books, you know. So, yeah. So then when Fonsie Mealy came to look at it, Fonsi was just blown away by it and was amazed by the things that he was seeing on the shelves. And, he said to me, do you realize how lucky you are?
And I said, oh, I said, we do. And I said, I often say that it's probably in the top three private libraries in Ireland. And his immediate reaction was, tell me where the other two are, because, he said, I can't think of a private library that measures up to this one. so I suppose it's it's really up there.
What's interesting about it is it shows one man's collection over a lifetime. But apart from that, it is of national importance. And the sad thing for, for Aiden at the time was that there was a tax relief if you gave it to a national institution. But if you gave your collection to a public library, there was no recognition and there was no tax relief. And
he did make, an appeal to the minister at the time, who was Sheila de Valera, and it was flatly turned down. No, had you given it to a national institution we would give you a tax rebate, but not to apublic library. And yet, it was important to Aiden that this material would be made available in Athlone and would help to fill a gap. There are people, there are scholars in the area who sometimes have to go to Dublin, just to check up something in, perhaps a journal or a particular book that that can't access online or that they haven't been able to access and they would spend, you know, a day going up and down to Dublin to check one reference. And now people like that may be able if they can check the catalog online. And if the item is here, staff will, by appointment, get that item out for them and, they can they can consult it here.
I suppose, John, what interests me is that, it's other people's reaction to the collection. And we have had a number of scholars, we've had Goldsmiths scholars, we've had Douglas Hyde scholars. We have had a number of people, a couple of Gaelic scholars looking for Irish language material, which, again, is very strong in the collection, but what always interest me in people's reaction to the collection.
And you got a little, private guided tour in preparation for this interview. And I just wonder what are your impressions of the collection having seen it? You're familiar with the Royal Irish Academy and the university libraries in Dublin. How do you see the Aidan Heavey collection?
Dr. John Gibney :
Well, when I went into first... you know, I did a doctorate in 17th century history a very, very long time ago at this stage but the first thing I saw were 17th century books that I'd looked at in the libraries of Trinity College, you know and that's that's very striking. And really elaborate bindings you know as well. I think anyone, with any interest in the Irish past, whether from a localized perspective or a national perspective could make extremely profitable use that collection, you know, from probably from the Middle Ages and early modern period up to the present. At the moment, I mean, the research program I work with for the Royal Irish Academy focuses on publishing, 20th century archives material about Irish foreign relations. But if I wanted to say so, you would have published a lot of documents about World War Two emergency. But if I wanted to write something around that, there's stuff on the shelf in there, you know, there's books about the period. There's also periodicals from the 1940s that would give you an insight into some strata of life at that time.
You know, I mean, no library or archive is ever going to give an entire story, but it depends how the volume of the stories they can tell thats the key thing. And, you know, I mean, some of my colleagues work on the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, you know, the cartographers and you've been talking about the maps of the Gregory Estate.
I think anyone with an interest in the Irish past could make very, very fruitful use of that collection. And the thing I kind of like about it is that, you know, I mean, you're asking me in relation to, you know, the day job, But I could come in and make use of that as member of the public, as anyone could. I know obviously it's not something you can have on the open shelves, you know, I wouldn't want my fiver year old going and playing with it, you know, but it's available through the public library system. And, you know, it has to be safeguarded, has to be, you know, preserved properly and it is. But the fact that, you know, you can walk in and make use of that anyone with an interest in Irish history and literature or bookbinding or so many other things could go into the Aidan Heavey and make very, very good use of it and it's an incredible, I suppose, benefit, an incredible resource to have that here in Athlone. All too often it's the case that, you know, serious archive collections and serious for collections that are clustered in Dublin at the Universities, or National Institutions, or universities outside Dublin.
But to have it in the public library! It's hard to think of other public libraries with similar items, you know, I mean Mayo would have the Jackie Clarke collection. Yes. Westmeath Libraries has this. That's an incredible resource to have on your doorstep.
Gearoid O'Brien :
Yeah, I must say that, I have seen scholars that have come from Dublin, who have come from university libraries and who still find material here that they cant find. And sometimes that is, you know, the particular collections that Aidan was very fond of himself. And, you know, when he collected Hyde, I mean, his Hyde collection even included the sketch of the portrait of Hyde that ended up on Áras an Uachtaráin, painted by Leo Whelan. He bought the sketch for that, and, you know, there's no end to what, if he was interested in something and something came on the market? I think he just said, well, listen, I'll go for that. It delights me when I see people making really good use of it and I suppose, while we're talking about it, in Westmeath Libraries we're very lucky in that we have dedicated local history rooms in both Athlone and Mullingar, and they are a great boon to any local researcher. But added to that is, that if there is an item in Aidan Heavey collection that you have identified on the catalog and you're curious to see it, you can make an appointment and view it.
And I suppose, it gives us something that a lot of other libraries don't have. I think, Aidan Heavey himself would be delighted that the collection is not just gathering dust, but that there are people using it. People like yourself becoming aware of it. And, it's something which I think will be treasured as part of Westmeath Libraries for many, many years to come.
Dearbhla : Thanks to John Gibney and Gearoid O'Brien for their fascinating talk about the Aidan Heavey collection, Athlone. If you're interested in visiting, please contact Athlone Library for more details. This has been Past Perspectives, a West Libraries podcast. Thanks for listening.