This collection comprises printed and manuscript materials primarily relating to county Tipperary collected by Timothy Looney and research material assembled and generated by him for local history lectures and walking tours. The most notable element of the collection is the substantial quantity of estate papers relating to Shanbally Castle, Clogheen, county Tipperary, built for Cornelius O’Callaghan, 1st Viscount Lismore in c. 1810. The building was demolished in stages by the Land Commission between 1957 and 1960, during which time the bulk of the family papers were destroyed. The papers salvaged by Timothy Looney (for which see sub-series P43/1/1) include a near complete set of rentals from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century account books, extensive estate correspondence from the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, and a range of townland map surveys from 1715 to 1898 primarily for counties Cork and Tipperary. Clogheen Fever Hospital records (sub-series P43/1/1/2/3) and the 1821 census records of Clogheen (P43/1/6/2) are also worth noting, as is the unusually large set of correspondence between Viscount Lismore’s tenants in counties Cork and Tipperary and his agent William Rochfort from the turn of the twentieth century (sub-series P43/1/1/5/1/3/1-2). The Looney collection further contains a quantity of estate papers from Castle Hyde and Doneraile Court in county Cork, and Castle Otway in county Tipperary.
Looney, Timothy (Tim) (1914-1990), local historianThis collection contains photographs, correspondence, school records and ephemera accrued by Hella Scholz during her youth and early adulthood. They provide insights into her life in Germany before and during the Second World War, which revolved mainly around school, hobbies, boyfriends and holidays. Wartime administration and the Nazi regime feature faintly in the backdrop: Hella was a member of Hitler Youth and of Bundes Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the girls’ wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. However, apart from owning a portrait of Adolph Hitler, there is no indication of Hella being a Nazi sympathiser, she was simply a young middle-class girl growing up during the Nazi regime. Some of the collection highlights include Hella’s correspondence with Günther Junge, a rare enough example of an exchange in which the letters of both parties survive, and an extensive photographic record of Hella’s life. The collection provides intimate glimpses of a life which remained remarkably happy and stable during an extraordinarily dark period of European history. Spanning as it does the rise and fall of National Socialism in twentieth-century Germany and post-war Britain, it forms a rewarding primary source for researchers of this era.
Fuller, Hella née Scholz (1925-2003)