In our last issue, I wrote about the great exhibition that took place in Herbert Park a century ago, so it is with great pleasure that I write about a new book on the event by Brian Siggins.

Brian previously wrote a short history on the exhibition in the book ‘The Roads to Sandymount, Irishtown and Ringsend’ (now re-issued) compiled by Sandymount Community Services.

This new publication of seven chapters over 125 pages takes us from the background to these types of grand exhibitions in the 19th and 20th centuries through the fine details of the making of the Irish Exhibition of 1907 which he calls in the title of this book ‘The Great White Fair’.

The book gives an interesting view of the scale of the show. How it took up all the ground between Donnybrook and Ballsbridge with large buildings to house the various exhibits that were dismantled when it was over, creating Herbert Park in its present form. The main road through Herbert Park from Ballsbridge to Donnybrook, lined with elm trees, is pretty much where the Grand Central Palace once stood.

There are photographs of the Canadian Water Chute in action, the remains of which is now the duck pond that every child in Dublin 4 has toddled around. The boats full of people splashed down from the chute and passed under two bridges, long since removed, and returned after sailing around an island that is now a wild bird habitat.

The photographs in the book from the show bring us back to a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom before the revolution, when the British King and Queen last paid a visit to Dublin, with the Great Exhibition as the best of Empire show which was opened and frequented by the Lords and Ladies of the time.

Media reports of the day show the arrival of the great and good, titled and famous, arriving at the show. It’s a book that takes us back to a time when being Irish was also to be British and this exhibition was a manifestation of Dublin’s place in the Empire.

Brian Siggins’s book is an important history of an exhibition that was to show a range of advancements in Irish industry and even an important event of the time, the introduction of incubators for maternity hospitals. It makes the current exhibits at the RDS look somewhat small-time, given the size of the show.

When reading and looking at the pictures, we have to go back in time, before the two world wars and the Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence that followed and by the Civil War which have shaped our relationship with the British since.

It was a time when the future was optimistic and not gripped by the damage of war both at home and abroad. This exhibition was to put Dublin at the forefront of the Empire at a time when separation from British rule was not on the horizon.

Brian Siggins is a member of the Old Dublin Society and tells in the introduction of how he gave a seminar about the Herbert Park event to an audience in the Iris Charles Centre on Newbridge Avenue some 15 years ago and was in luck then to get to meet Mrs Mary Murray of Sandymount, who was a centenarian and was able to say that she had slid down the Water Chute when she was fifteen. She had clear recollections of the exhibition and was able to give Brian some interviews, so that his history here has been helped by her personal experiences of the event.

The book is from a series published by Nonsuch Publishing, ‘Images of Ireland’ and is full of images of a time gone by, when Dubliners travelled by tram to a show that both entertained and informed.

‘The Great White Fair’ by Brian Siggins is available at Books on the Green and all good book shops (€16.99).

Above: Brian Siggins with Rev. Dudley Lebistone Cooney.