'The Irish Times archive is a treasure trove of 150 years of Irish life'

Some years ago, writing the first of a series of detective novels based in Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s, I found a shortage of real detail about the period. Books were fine on broad events, but where was the immediacy of the stuff of life?

I turned to period newspapers, initially with specific demands. My story needed a Garda raid on an abortion “clinic”, but I didn’t want a conventional backstreet abortionist. I wanted a man working in plain sight, with powerful connections.

Historical fiction, like all fiction, is an act of imagination, but readers expect the history to be “historical”. I was unsure my “plain sight” abortionist wasn’t stretching things too far. Readers don’t need all the facts to smell anachronism.

Searching for something real, I went to the Irish Times archive. Within minutes I had a 1930s raid on a Merrion Square abortionist, yards from Leinster House.

“Detective Sergeant Lynch... discovered a quantity of medical equipment and electrical apparatus in the back drawing-room… From the ceiling a large 170 centimetre lamp hung… over a gynaecological chair… In a room used as an office, a book on obstetrics had a marker at a page dealing with abortion…”

A sophisticated abortion clinic operating in plain sight; it had raked in big profits. The equipment, imported from Germany, was superior to anything in Irish hospitals. Only those with real money could have afforded the services.

The police raid on 25 Merrion Square was described in the spare, measured Irish Times prose that I would come to admire so much. It included a line Raymond Chandler, had he sent Philip Marlowe to Dublin, would have relished.

“In a drawer a cardboard box contained a dozen contraceptives and a revolver.”

The Irish Times archive is a treasure trove of some 150 years of Irish history and life, remarkable for its variety and depth of subject matter and for its writing. It carried, still in the 1930s and 40s, its inheritance as one of the newspapers of record of an empire as well as a country, but its defiant combination of the international, the national and the “parish pump” was unique.

The paper’s coverage of international news in the period that matters to me is exhaustive and detailed. The briefest scan of what was happening in Germany, Italy, France, Britain, America, in every corner of the world, in the lead up to the second World War, brings fresh perspectives to what we thought we knew.

I was interested in Danzig, now Polish Gdansk, and the role of the Irish diplomat, Sean Lester, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner in the tiny city state where the first shots of a world war would eventually be fired. Lester fought a solitary, hopeless battle against the rise of Nazism in Danzig. I had read about it, but only in the pages of The Irish Times did I meet the rawness of what it meant, as his car was pelted with mud and he was spat at in the street.

The sheer quantity of information contained in its dense columns of print makes reading The Irish Times then a very different experience to a modern newspaper. Features were scarce, so were opinion pieces outside the careful, considered editorials. There was barely any celebrity gossip. Facts, incidents, events, unadorned, were the order of the day. Hard, accurate news that the vast resources of the internet, remarkably, struggle to provide now. If nothing is truly objective in journalism, The Irish Times exemplified a determination to make it so; nothing else would do. To read it is to feel how the line between opinion and reporting has blurred in journalism today. I am not sure history, seeking the character of life and politics in our times, will regard us kindly.

In terms of style, Irish Times journalists, mostly anonymous, made the paper a byword for economical, precise prose long before the 1930s, and long after. In 1980s London a friend doing some freelance subbing at the Guardian was approached by an elderly editor who tore up a piece of his edited copy. He dropped the day’s Irish Times on the desk and said, “Read that then do it again”.

Delving into The Irish Times archive in the course of three novels, with a fourth in hand, has brought me very close to Ireland’s recent past and the people who inhabited it. It has given me a perspective on how Ireland looked out at the world at a time of impending crisis and in on itself. But it is the range of content that informs, surprises and delights. Look at one edition; only 10 broadsheet pages. The date is December 28th, 1939, days after the IRA raid on the Phoenix Park Magazine Fort. The arms raid features prominently; road blocks, cordons, arrests, searches all over Leinster. But here is a just a glimpse of the rest of it.

Russians Call Up More Men: the war between Russia and Finland. Crews Eat Icicles: fishermen adrift in fog off Galway. Six-Ounce Meat Ration: the war in Northern Ireland. The internment of the battleship Graf Spee’s crew in Argentina sits beside the Lurgan Cage Bird Society Show. An Irishman’s Diary describes a bicycle ride through Stephen’s Green at 4am on Stephen’s Day. Whale Hunters reviews, unexpectedly, a Swedish film just premiered in Stockholm. A piece on Britons imprisoned by Germany follows a report on a Royal School Cavan reunion. Bertie Smyllie’s editorial predicts the war will be a fight to the bitter end; the idea that Britain will surrender is “merely fantastical”.

Sport gave extensive coverage to Leopardstown racing. Gaelic games featured, with snooker (Joe Davis’s 104th century break), fox-hunting, coursing, lacrosse, golf. Leon Trotsky appeared beside a lengthy badminton report, with his views on the Russo-Finnish war: “I am entirely against it”. Alongside the financial markets, particularly the USA’s, are the prices of cattle and produce in markets all over Ireland and Britain. Prime bullocks 44/- to 49/6 in Belfast; cabbages 10/- a load in Dublin, potatoes 4/6 per cwt; conger eels 16/- to 35/- per box.

A farmer was found shot in Liscannor. 250 people attended Messrs Smyth and Co’s staff dance in Balbriggan. A peregrine falcon weighing 2½ lbs was shot in Macroom. A candle started a fire at the Sacred Heart Church, Roscommon. Radio Eireann offered Jack Smyth, “Variety with carillon, auto-harp, mandolin and stories”, with comic-opera music from the Irish Radio Orchestra to follow.

An eccentric mix, not only by the standards of modern journalism, yet it is what makes The Irish Times extraordinary, uniquely great world newspaper and local journal. In doing that for 150 years, it captured Ireland itself.

When I first looked into the archive, I felt like Howard Carter peering into Tutankhamun’s tomb. I saw very ordinary things that were not ordinary at all, the stuff of life pushed up hard against the sweep of history. And all that had come together to make a great national treasure, filled with ‘wonderful things’.

The City in Darkness by Michael Russell is published by Constable, £13.99