Big interest in Big Fella with €200k letters

A COLLECTION of Michael Collins’s letters has fetched €202,000 at auction.

The letters went under the hammer at the James Adam-Mealy’s Independence auction in Dublin.

The 29 letters and several notebooks, which charted his life prior to the Rising, his subsequent incarceration and his growth into a rebel leader, had been estimated to make €70,000-€90,000. The hammer price of €202,000 far exceeded this expectation.

The most expensively estimated letter, to his sister Hannie just after the Easter Rising of 1916, was estimated at €5,000- €7,000 and sold for €16,000. The subjects are sometimes personal. In this one he mentioned a long letter from Celestine (his sister Helena, a nun) — full of prayers about love your enemies which “as you may understand I don’t a little bit”. He had already found a way around the prison censor.

The letters, which came from a relation of Michael Collins, deal with subjects as personal as the death of his mother, or talk about the “other one” Kitty Kiernan, vent his thoughts on the material prosperity that he felt had ruined the young people on his return from jail in England.

They were all bought over the telephone during the evening session of the auction. Stuart Cole of Adams would only say afterwards that: “The majority would appear to have been bought by a single person. It is likely that they will be staying in the country”.

The disappointment of the day was the failure of lot 527 to sell. This was a copy of the Proclamation of 1916. It had been estimated at €100,000-€150,000. It is thought that no more than 50 copies of the original have survived and many of these are in public collections.

This failure was more than offset by a sale which brought in €655,000. No less than 80% of the lots on offer found buyers. Among them was Terence MacSwiney’s Volunteer Diary 1915. This manuscript diary recorded MacSwiney’s daily activities as a Volunteer organiser in Co Cork from September-December 1915, in a small Eason’s card-covered pocket-book. It had been estimated at €6,000-€8,000 and sold for €7,500.

A small .32 Calibre handgun, formerly the property of Countess Markievicz, also made €7,500. It had been given by Countess Markievicz to Seamus Babington of the Tipperary IRA and was estimated at €800-€1,400. The sale of 631 lots included photos, autograph books, medals, swords and flags.