British Government Film Archive

[5intheface]

With lots of chat here about upcoming and possible movies about Irish history, I thought posters might be interested in this archive.

The National Archives Learning Curve | Focus on Film | 1900-45 | Ireland

There are three clips here; The first deals with Irishmen in WW1, the second shows the aftermath of the '16 Rising and lastly, the body of a dead IRA man being carried off during The War of Independence.

The first two were sponsored by the War Office and the third is Pathe News.

[pete2]

Thank you, interesting clips. Who is that in the third one waving back the crowd, dressed in trenchcoat?

[5intheface]

Thank you, interesting clips. Who is that in the third one waving back the crowd, dressed in trenchcoat?

Hard to say pete, I suppose we only have their word that it is an IRA man's body, could be a piece of propoganda just as easy. (Unless anyone else is familiar with the details of the clip)

[Gabha Óir]

That is 98 Talbot St outside the business of Joseph Speidil, a Methodist Pork Butcher.

Here he is in the 1911 census.
National Archives

And there's a good chance that it is , as is stated in the blurb, the dead body is that of Seán Treacy having been shot in a gun battle on Talbot St. on the 14th October 1920.

I have seen that clip of the dude in the trenchcoat waving people away before but not the full reel.

[5intheface]

That is 98 Talbot St outside the business of Joseph Speidil, a Methodist Pork Butcher.

Here he is in the 1911 census.
National Archives

And there's a good chance that it is , as is stated in the blurb, the dead body is that of Seán Treacy having been shot in a gun battle on Talbot St. on the 14th October 1920.

I have seen that clip of the dude in the trenchcoat waving people away before but not the full reel.

Cheers for that. BTW what does methodist pork taste like?

[Gabha Óir]

Cheers for that. BTW what does methodist pork taste like?

Once you go Meths you never go back

[Mitsui]

Man alive, that looks like the real deal - I've wondered about this film for years!

I'd have to look this up, but I do know that the gunfight in which Treacy was killed happened in Talbot Street - he was visiting a shop there that was under observation. Two (I think) Secret Service men tried to kill/arrest him (by that stage, certainly in Treacy's case, it amounted to the same thing). The British were in civvies, and it's even possible that the body being carried away in the clip is one of them - I think Treacy killed one.

The clincher for me, though, is this: the couple of photos of the gunfight that you see in history books always puzzled me, because I wondered a) how on earth someone with a camera happened to be on the spot & b) with the clunky old cameras of the period, how they captured any of the action at all.

Then I read somewhere that a British Pathe newsreel cameraman had heard rumours that something was going down in the area and set up his camera before the action started.

This answered both my questions - i.e. if the published pictures were stills from a piece of film - but I never discovered whether any of that actual film still existed. This would certainly seem to be part of it. The question now is, if this clip of the aftermath survived, what about the film of the actual gunfight from which the photographs were taken?

[5intheface]

What strikes me in that final clip is the natural movement of those on camera, not the usual jerky, high speed motion one usually assocciates with older film. There are certainly two bodies being carried away from the scene but only one dead mentioned in the blurb.

[pete2]

Talbot st on youtube with soundtrack says he was gunned down outside a 'Republican outfitters' 94 Talbot Street which belonged to Paddy Clancy, second in command of Dublin.
YouTube - sean tracy

[shutuplaura]

This is always what I'd heard. Some Pathe cameraman knew the Republican Outfitters was a magnet for republicans (obviously enough I suppose) and went down there on the chance of catching a few pictures of someone famous. Then Treacy showed up, then the military, who clearly had the same idea as the cameraman. I've always wondered too if footage of the actual shootout has survived. There is a few photos of the shootout I know, but I'm not sure who took these also or if they are in fact just stills from a longer clip than the one seen. My guess though is if the footage existed we'd have seen it by now - very dramatic stuff like that would be almost stock footage in any documentary of the period.