Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 4 April 2014

Talk on Cork’s Exhibitions

Next week on Wednesday morning, on 9 April, as part of Cork Lifelong Learning Festival, I present a public lecture on a history of Cork Exhibitions (10.30am, Meeting room, Church of the Real Presence, Curaheen).  Cork has had three exhibitions (1852, 1883 & 1902/3) and one fair (1932). All put the city in a highly visible place in Irish public life and in the popular imagination. All developed social tools to push forward an ideology, representation and symbolism that marked Cork’s and Ireland’s place in the British empire under British rule and in the context of the 1932 fair in the early twentieth century.

The exhibitions were the brain child of Cork’s social elite. The exhibitions became a marketing strategy where spectacle and culture merged. Aesthetics of architecture, colour, decoration and lighting were all added to the sense of spectacle and in a tone of moral and educational improvement. The events also aimed to consolidate ideologically and extend the authority of the city’s corporate, political and scientific leadership. Each stand in its own way promoted ideas about the relations of the Cork city and other nations, the spread of education, the advancement of science, the nature of domestic life and the place of art in society.

The 1902 exhibition, for example, had several hundred exhibits on display from May to October in the Mardyke in prefabricated timber buildings. The main categories of exhibits included a women’s section, raw materials section, geological specimens section, natural history section, modern science section, archaeological and historical section, raw materials industrially treated section, forestry section, educational section and a nature study section. By the close of the Exhibition, over one million people had visited the Cork site. The newspapers of the day wrote about the exhibition enchanting and diverting the masses from more serious matters such as unemployment and housing conditions.

The ideals and symbols of the exhibitions were even magnified for their opening day where the Exhibition organisers sought to embrace the wider public. The Cork exhibitions presented a national narrative of modernity – how the fusion of Irish national values were reflected and materialised. The opening day on 1 May 1902 was observed as a general holiday. The large drapery houses remained closed till 2 pm by which the procession had passed through the thoroughfares. From an early hour, people anxious to watch the spectacle densely crowded advantage points. Special trains ran on all the railway systems converging on the city. Previous to the procession, various trades, national bodies, city bands and county contingents formed in Anglesea Street at the Municipal Building

A lavish opening ceremony marked the opening outlined key speeches that were made. The Concert Hall possessed comfortable seating accommodation in the auditorium for two thousand persons, while the organ loft afforded ample room.  The opening speeches embraced a forward looking universalising future, a creative entrepreneurialism, the quest to create a spectacle of technological innovation whilst engaging a national past.  They asserted difference while maintaining internal communication within an Empire culture.  

The Cork Examiner noted of the canata “The Building of the Ship” being performed. The canata had been especially composed for the Leeds Musical Festival of 1886 and was written by Henry Wadeworth Longfellow and composed by John Francis Barnett. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a commanding figure in the cultural life of nineteenth-century America. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, he became a national literary figure by the 1850s, and a world- famous personality by the time of his death in 1882. Henry Wadeworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy.

The story of the Building of the Ship poem deals with the Master who heard his merchant’s word with delight and who designed the model of a ship of modern mould, built for “freight and yet for speed, a beautiful and gallant craft, which was to be completed by a youth, “the heir of desterity”, who when he had built and launched the ship, was to receive the hand of the old man’s daughter. The vessel was to be built of “cedar of Maine and Georgia Pine”- indicating the northern and southern states of the US – and the “ Union” was to be her name.

The whole process of construction is elaborately and eloquently described, how the heavy hammers and mallets were plied until at length at the mast head the stars and stripes unrolled and all is finished and the bridal day is the day of the launching. The poem concluded; “Then, too sail on, O Ship of State, Sail on, O Union, strong and great”. The poem was read in Cork to symbolise the unity of purpose of Industrial Ireland – north and south – how the project was built up and how on its completion it was publicly launched with the best wishes of all classes of the community, with the hope that it may be “safe from all adversity”. These sentiments are also echoed in the origins of many of the stands at the 1902 Exhibition, with many coming from the southern and northern Ireland (more at the lecture).

Caption:

735a. Illustration of central industrial hall, Cork International Exhibition, 1902 (source: Cork Museum)