No matter what your area of interest happens to be there is much in Fonsie Mealy’s Collectors’ Sale online from Castlecomer on March 3 to keep you occupied during this long lockdown. Literature, local and national history, sport and cinema all feature. These sales always throw up lots that offer insights into the day to day working lives of people like Michael Collins or the late Victorian and Edwardian Corkonians who mounted what seems to me to be the best show this city ever produced, the Cork Exhibition of 1901-02. A typed letter from the Aire Airgead (Minister for Finance) of 1920 is in fact a typically businesslike response from Michael Collins to a request from Skibbereen. Peadar Ó hAnnracháin (1873-1965), Gaelic League organiser, poet and Volunteer, had sought assistance for local fishermen. Collins, as minister, promised action but advised that the first thing to be done was to set up a co-operative society “as we deal only with Societies and not with individuals”. The letter, lot 407 in a sale of 673 lots, is estimated at 400-600.A letter of June 2, 1920 from Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, to the Superintendent, Great Southern and Western Railway, supports a request from Messrs. Henry Ford of Cork for two sleeping carriages to be attached to the mail train between Cork and Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire). The letter, estimated at €450-€650, is on black bordered official notepaper following the assassination of Lord Mayor Tomas MacCurtain. By any standards the Cork Exhibition was a magnificent event. Insight into the largely forgotten organisers might be found in lot 378, a 1911 book entitled Cork and County in the 20th century, Contemporary Biographies by Rev. R.J. Hodges edited by W. T. Pike, estimated at €200-€300.Lot 315 is a Maharajah’s photo album gift to engineer Vincent Hart. It is inscribed; “To V. Hart Esq., Superintending Engineer, Madras. With the best compliments of Ramchandra, Maharajah of Jeypore”. He was responsible for building the Mettur Dam on the River Cauvery, at that time the biggest solid gravity dam in the world. He retired to Cork and died at his house at Lotabeg on the Lower Glanmire Road in 1939. The album is estimated at 1,000-€1,500. A selection of sporting memorabilia includes lot 616, the match programme for the 1945 All Ireland Football Final between Cork and Cavan (Cork won by 2-5 to 0-7) and some Munster Championship official programmes. Among the cinema memorabilia are posters for The Field, Ryan’s Daughter and Michael Collins.
