Remembering 1922
One hundred years ago on 30 June 1922 an explosion in the Treasury building of the Public Record Office of Ireland destroyed much of the nation’s archival wealth. From ‘Ardfeenish’ – her home at 21 Upper Mount Street, Dublin – Rosamond Emily Stephen (1868–1951), later to become the founding benefactor of the RCB Library, witnessed the impact and recorded the events of that fateful day in her personal ‘Record’. ‘At twenty minutes to one by these clocks … there came a most tremendous explosion. I was typing in my vestibule but it was so loud that I…
