Life
1801-1879 [Thomas Aiskew Larcom]; b. Hampshire; son of a naval captain who directed Navy docks in Malta; ed, Royal Military Academy, Woolwich; served in Gibraltar as 2nd Lieut., Royal Engineers; engaged by Ordnance Survey of England and Wales, 1824-26 under [Major] Thomas Colby; appt. his asst. at Mountjoy Hse., Phoenix Park, 1824; Director on Irish Ordnance Survey, 1828-46 [var. 1845]; learnt Irish from John O’Donovan, introduced to him by Irish Society (missionary); when he embarked on a massive expansion of the statistical function of the service founded on the principles of military engineering which characterised the official surveys conducted elsewhere in Britain; successfully completed the projected 6-inch to a mile maps, publ. 1830;
formed the Historical Department of Survey, under direction of George Petrie and employing , O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry and others - all charged with gatherinf information embracing archaeological and topography along with economics, occupations, customs and folk-memories - all intended to comprise the county-based volumes of the Ordnance Survey; elected MRIA, 1833; government withdrawal of funding from the Historical Dept. curtailed publication after the unique volume on Templemore parish, Co. Derry (1835) - which left residue of a large corpus of materials unpublished relating to the many other designated regions; following an inconclusive commission to enquire into costs, the matter was decided by Sir Robert Peel who called for the cost to be met my private subscription; large public outcry from all parties in Ireland voiced in the press at the cessation of the project, spearheaded by Lord Adare [afterwards Dunraven] and supported by William Smith O’Brien and others, 1844; m. Georgina, dg. of Gen. Sir George d'Aguilar, 1 March 1840 (with whom five children, two of whom predeceased him);
appt. Census Commisioner in 1841; Commissioner on Colleges in 1845; appt. Commissioner of Public Works [Board of Works] 1846-49 - organising famine relief, and served as Dep.-Chairman the Board, 1850-53; dismissed from the Ordance Commission by Colby, following a period of rancerous relations, 8 May 1848; served on committee to reform Dublin Corporation in 1849; elected to Senate of Queen’s University (Belfast), 1849; appt. as Under-Secretary of Ireland, 1853-68 - being the first permanent holder under several viceroys; created KCB, 1860; a firm Unionist, and vigorously engaged as Under-Secretary in the use of military force to stamp out Fenianism, he also sought to ensure a fair, non-sectarian dispensation of law aiming to fulfil the aim of equal citizenship for all British subjects; he edited Sir William Petty’s Down Survey of 1685 as The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Irish Archael. Soc. 1851); suffered ill-health through exhaustion and retired from office, Dec. 1868; created baronet; and appt. to Irish Privy Council; d. 15 June, 1879, at Heathfield, nr. Fareham, Hampshire; survived by wife and remaining children;
The Ordnance Survey came to new attention when it was taken as the topic of Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), a study of irish cultural in colonial crisis which harps on the replacement on Irish place-names with English ones on the part of insensitive Army officers and features social violence around the commission which never, in fact, occurred - a view contested by others including John Andrews, author of the chief source (Paper Landscapres, 1975); Larcom’s extensive papers are held in TCD and NLI un uniform volumes. ODNB DIH [RIA]
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Criticism
Older sources: [Samuel Ferguson,] "Ordnance Survey in Ireland", in Dublin University Magazine, 23, 1844, pp.497-500 [though acc. to Joep Leerssen, who cites it thus, this ascription is put in doubt by Peter Denman in Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achivement, Gerrards Cross, 1990, pp.212-13]; [J. T. Gilbert, On the Life and Laboures of Hohn O’Donovan, LL.D., London 1862.
Recent commentary: John [H.] Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in nineteeth-century Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press), xxiv, 350pp., ill. [9 lvs. of pls.; Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996), pp.101-04; Stíofan Ó Cadhla, Civilising Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824-1842 - Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Blackrock: IAP 2006). Thomas H. Jordan, Two Thomases: Dublin Castle and the Quality of Life in Victorian Ireland [Social Indicators Research, Vol. 64, Issue 2] (Dordrecht 2003), 257pp. [concerning Undersecretary Thomas Drummond and Thomas Larcom].
On Gaelic Aspects: Art Ó Maolfabhaill, ‘An tSuirbhéireacht Ardanas agus Logainmheancha na hEireann, 1824-34&146;, in Proc. RIA, C Ser. 89 (1898); Do., ‘Eadhbéard O’ Raghallaigh, Sean Ó Donnabhain agus an tSuirbheireacht Ordanais&146;, in Ómós do Eoghan Ó Comhraí, ed. P. O´ Fiannachta (Maynooth 1995), 145-84.
Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) lists bibl.: R. B. McDowell, The Irish Administration 1801–1914 (1964); Charles Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (1969); Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, an Anglo–American Dilemma (1971); J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-century Ireland (1975); Andrews. ‘Thomas Aiskew Larcom 1801–1879’, in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vii, ed T. W. Freeman (1983), 71–74; J. P. Browne, ‘Wonderful knowledge: the Ordnance Survey of Ireland’, in Éire–Ireland, XX (Spring 1985), pp.15–27; Patricia Boyne, John O’Donovan (1806–1961): A Biography (1987), inter al.
[ See also sundry references to Larcom and the Ordnance Commission under Brian Friel (q.v.). ]
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Commentary
R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane/Penguin 1993), remarking: ‘Larcom recruited scholars of the quality of O’Donovan, Petrie, and O’Curry ... to explore the history of place-names ... very like the history of a locality ... the finished result of this magnifient conception stopped at one parish study, finally produced in Nov. 1837, and so loaded with accretions and detail that the original idea of accompanying every map with a similar study was abandoned.’ (p.6.); Ftn. cites instructions to collectors, regarding ‘Habits of the people [...] Nothing more indicates the state of civilisation and intercourse.’ (Foster, Notes, p.309; Bibl., T. F. Colby, Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry. Volume the First, Memoirs of the city and North-western Liberties of Londonderry, Parish of Templemore [1837]; also J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape, The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth Century Ireland (OUP 1975). Note: the full extent of this quotation (here abbreviated) is given separately under Quotations [infra].
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996) - remarks in footnotes that the view that the Ordnance Commission engaged in the ‘travesty of Irish placenames which formed part of an estrangement inflicted by colonial rule probably derives from remarks to that effect in Douglas Hyde, On the Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland (1892). Leerssen likewise recounts the substance of the exchange between Friel and Andrews in Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History’, in The Crane Bag, 7, 2, (1983), pp.118-24. (Op. cit., 1996, n.95, pp.256-57.)
Leerssen (cont.): Leerssen here suggests Andrews might have pointed out that Friel’s play, far from ‘making play with his book’ (as admitted by Friel) ‘gave a serious and unironic distortion of the historical reality [...] but was too courteous to go that far and instead chose graciously to excuse Friel’s play ono the grounds of its very failure to be realistic, allowing that it [...] constructed its own projection of an imagined Ordnance Comission as /only a dramatic convenience.”’ (Leerssen, ibid., p.257.)
Leerssen (cont.) - writes: ‘[S]ome later critics of an a-critically nationalist persuasion have hinted that the Ordnance Survey was halted by the British Government for ideological reasons. Andrews describes the extent to which the suspension of the Ordance Survey came to be added to a list of national Irish grievances at the hands of a repressive British government, “a deliberated act of cultural warfare, on a par with the Statutes of Kilkenny or Cromwell’s act of satisfaction.” [Andrews, A Paper Landscape, 1975, p.174.]’ Leerssen concludes that this view was ‘probably first brought into currency’ by Stokes’s life of Petrie’ [William Stokes, Life and Labour in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie, LL.D., London 1868], and voiced at its most strident by Alice Stopford Green and Rev. P. M. MacSweeney [A Group of Nation Builders: O’Donovan, O’Curry, Petrie, Dublin: Catholic Truth Society 1913).] (Leerssen op. cit., 1996, n. 96., p.257.)
[ See extensive copy of Joep Leerssen, ‘New Departures: the Ordnance Survey and the Royal Academy’, in Remembrance and Imagination [... &c.] (1996) - as attached. ]
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Quotations
Habits of the People: Larcom’s instructions to the collectors under the heading of ‘Habits of the people’ in the History Department of the Ordnance Survey read: ‘Note the general style of the cottages, as stone, mud, slated, glass windows, one storey or two, number of rooms, comfort and cleanliness. Food; fuel; dress; longevity; usual number in a family; early marriages; any remarkable instance on either of these heads? What are the amusements and recreations? patrons and patrons’ days; and traditions respecting them? What local customs prevail, as beal Tinne, or fire on St. John’s Eve? Driving cattle through fire, and through water? Peculiar games? any legendary tales or poems recited around the fireside? Any ancient music, as clan marches or funeral cries? They differ in different districts, colle them if you can. Any peculiarity of costume? Nothing more indicates the state of civilisation and intercourse.’
[Bibl. note: The above passage has been quoted in full J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape, 1975) and again in R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, Allen Lane 1993, Notes, p.309 [as supra]; also in Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination [... &c.], 1996, p.257, n.102 - and therein cited as as Andrews, A Paper Landscape [1975], p.148; also Andrews, in The Crane Bag, 7, 2, 1983, p.119.)
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References
Doherty & Hickey, A Chronology of Irish History since 1500 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989), under “Ordnance”: begun in 1830 under Col. Thomas Colby of the Royal Engineers, assted by Lieut. Thomas Larcom [q.v.], whose idea it was that the survey should embrace every item of local information relating to the country; headings for surveyors, Natural topography; ancient topography; modern topography; social economy; first report appeared in 1838, but govt. decided to discontiue on grounds of expense; commission of 1843 examined Petrie and other witnesses and recommended that the Survey be continued but the govt. rejected its findings. [ODNB, is under-secretarial ‘adminstration marked by steady increase in prosperity’].
Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds Thomas Aiskew Larcom, The Cromwellian Survey of Ireland (Dublin 1851).
Hyland Books (Oct. 1995) lists Correspondence respecting the Scale for the Ordnance Survey & upon Contouring & Hill Delineation (1854), 373pp., incl. letters of Larcom, Colby, Griffith, et al.
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Notes
Dedication: John O’Donovan’s 7-vol. edn. of the Annals of the Four Masters (1848-51) is dedicated to Larcom with the words: ‘The editor has also been assisted by various others, but more especially by his friend, Captain Larcom, R.E., who had been the active promoter of Irish literature, antiquities, and statistics, ever since the summer of 1825 and who, during his connexion with the Ordnance Survey, exerted himself most laudably to illustrate and preserve the monuments of ancient Irish history and topography.’ (See Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, n., p.198.)
Collapse of premises: The Irish Times (1 April 2000) reported a collapse of a roof in Phoenix House where the priceless collection of the Placenames Dept. was stored - formerly the responsibility of the Dept. of Finance, and now under Ministry for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. Ms. Sheila de Valera answered questions as Minister on a possible removal to Tullamore, considered unviable in view of location of four archivists and necessary contact with TCD Library, Registry of Deeds and National Library. (See Irish Times, 1 April 2000).
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