About the Allison Collection
The Allison collection is an important photographic archive held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) which covers a fifty year period around the beginning of the twentieth century.
At one time there were Allison photographic studios at Dundalk, Armagh, Newry and Warrenpoint, but Armagh remained the centre of the business. The Allison collection constitutes a good photographic account of provincial (urban and rural) life from the early 1900s until the Second World War. The photographs include street scenes; historic and commercial buildings; churches, shops, schools and country houses; the workplace and transport; and above all, the people of Armagh city and country. The PRONI Reference for the Collection is D2886.
Herbert Allison
Herbert Thackwray Allison was born in Bradford in 1854. He and his brother came to Ireland in 1881 and set up a photographic business, trading as Allison & Allison, in Belfast, where they had branches at Donegall Square North and Queen's Arcade. Towards the end of the century, as the art and practice of taking photographs developed and expanded, the Allisons spotted a niche in the market outside Belfast and set about establishing country branches in Dundalk (1896), Armagh (1900), Newry, (1903) and Warrenpoint (1905). In May 1900, a manager was installed in the Armagh studio at 42 Scotch Street but when he left in 1903, Herbert Thackwray Jnr, who had been working in the Belfast business, was sent to Armagh where he was to remain for almost fifty years. Herbert Snr moved to live at Warrenpoint about 1905 and ran the Newry and Warrenpoint studios. Over the years he was a tireless worker for his adopted town, serving as a JP and councillor and living there until his death at the age of 94 in 1947.
Advert for H. Allison & Co. Photographers, Dundalk Studio (Tempest's Annual, 1910)
The collection
The subjects portrayed in the collection are wide and varied and provide a deep pictorial insight into the social mores of life in Cos Armagh, Down, and Louth (and to a lesser degree, Cos Fermanagh, Monaghan and Londonderry) during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. They include: transport; clerical and church; architecture and buildings; medicine; sport; musical and dramatic scenes; the Orange Order; businesses and people at work; life during the 1st and 2nd World Wars; portraits of individuals, families and weddings; agriculture; youth organisations. Even within a particular subject the nature of the photographs is wide-ranging, eg, the transport section encompasses: scenes of the Armagh railway disaster, June, 188; schoolboys entering a dental caravan, c.1936; police transport, 1922, and a car rally at Warrenpoint, 1908, etc. Other interesting photographs illustrating the disparate backgrounds of those people captured by the Allison lens include: Michael Collins, (elected as MP for Armagh in the new northern parliament), at a large Sinn Fein demonstration on 4 September 1921 and a wartime wedding, 3 July 1943, when Maureen Donnelly of Railway Street became the first GI bride in Armagh.The Armagh studio
It was the Armagh office which became the hub of the enterprise and was generally regarded as the headquarters until it was sold to Ernest Scott in 1952. All the printing was carried out there and the custom grew up that Herbert Snr would travel weekly by train to Armagh, from Newry, with the week's work from the two Co. Down studios, collect the prints and return home.This Armagh factor is reflected in the history and content of the archive. The Armagh studio became the final repository for the surviving glass-plate negatives from all four provincial branches before their transfer to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland by Mr Scott. Inevitably, the greater number of those negatives which have survived relate to Armagh and the surrounding area, but the work of the Newry, Warrenpoint and Dundalk studios is represented also.
