Born: 9 February 1911, Ireland
Died: 7 July 2001
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Ciarán Wallace. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Griffith, Margaret Catherine (1911–2001), archivist and historian, was born at Newcastle Terrace, Galway, on 9 February 1911 to William Graham Griffith of Fairfield, Barbados, and Margaret Arthur Brown of Dunfermline, Scotland (William took his mother Sarah’s surname; his father’s name does not appear on the civil birth record). Margaret Brown was the daughter of James Brown, a yarn-buyer in Dunfermline. The pair were married in the bride’s hometown on 24 December 1908, the marriage certificate listing ‘the late Hon. John Griffith’ as the groom’s father. Margaret Catherine was the eldest of their three children, along with her sister Rosalie (b. 1915) and brother Thomas (b. 1917). The family were recorded as members of the Church of England in the 1911 census.
Griffith studied at Galway grammar school (1925–8) where she won prizes for her examination results in successive years. An Erasmus Smith school, Galway grammar school catered to protestant pupils of all denominations. Griffith went on to pursue a diverse university career, attending University College Galway (1929–30), where she obtained firsts in French, English and history. She was exempted from the Latin examination, having already completed the required coursework. In 1930 she transferred to Somerville College, Oxford, then an all-female college, where she was awarded the Coombs prize and the Shaw Lefevre exhibition (1932). In January 1932 her father took his own life at the family home on College Road, Galway, while Margaret was home for the Christmas vacation. She graduated in 1933 with a first-class honours Bachelor of Arts (BA) in modern history, followed by a Bachelor of Letters (B.Litt.) (1935) for her thesis on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century parliamentary history of Ireland, also from Oxford. Returning to Ireland, Griffith obtained a Master of Arts (MA) (1936) and a Higher Diploma in Education (H. Dip.Ed.) (1937) from Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
In May 1934, while still a postgraduate at Oxford, Griffith was appointed to a lectureship in medieval history at TCD, a post she held until 1938. During this time she also served as assistant examiner in history for the Ministry of Education in Northern Ireland. After a brief period teaching in Godolphin and Latymer school, Hammersmith, London (1938–9) Griffith returned to Dublin to take up a post as librarian and translator in the Department of Industry and Commerce’s statistics branch. From late 1940 until November 1944 she was seconded to the Department of Defence, where she worked as a librarian with the Defence Forces’ intelligence branch (G2) under Colonel Dan Bryan. Her expertise in German and Italian gained her a promotion to undertake ‘special translation’ work and carry out unspecified ‘executive duties’ (information from Military Archives, Dublin).
Griffith joined the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI – one of the forerunners of the National Archives of Ireland) as assistant deputy keeper in November 1944, returning to G2 on a part-time basis between April and June 1945. The PROI, then under the Department of Justice, was a neglected institution still recovering from the destruction of its record repository in the opening engagement of the civil war in June 1922. Its collections mainly comprised court and legal documents. Along with her colleague Breandán Mac Giolla Choille, who joined on the same day, Griffith brought fresh enthusiasm to the organisation. In 1950 she represented the PROI at the first international congress organised by the International Council on Archives, in Paris. In her early years at the PROI, Griffith contributed articles to Irish Historical Studies (including ‘The Irish Record Commission, 1810–30’ (1950) and ‘A short guide to the Public Record Office of Ireland’ (1952)), but perhaps her main contribution to scholarship was her archival activity, which enabled publications by many other scholars. She produced a revised edition of Herbert Wood and A. E. Langman’s Calendar of the justiciary rolls (1956) and an edition of Irish patent rolls of James I (1966).
Promoted to deputy keeper in 1956, Griffith was the first woman to hold the most senior post in the archive. She championed the accession of government department records, predicting in 1961 that such records would become a mainstay of the PROI’s activity. Griffith’s extensive archival work included listing major collections such as the Quit Rent Office, the Commissioners of National Education and the Office of the Public Works, a remarkable output when one considers that she was the only archival professional based at the PROI through the 1960s (Mac Giolla Choille worked at the State Paper Office in Dublin Castle). During her tenure as head of the PROI, Griffith persuaded a parsimonious Department of Justice to purchase medieval Irish records at auction in London. As deputy keeper, Griffith was appointed ex officio to the Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC) in October 1956, where she made significant contributions until her retirement in March 1971. She edited the exchequer inquisitions (Henry VIII to William III), wrote a descriptive note for the calendar of British departmental correspondence (1683–1740) in the PROI, collated the London versions of James Morrin’s Calendar of patent and close rolls, chancery, Henry VIII–Eliz. I (1863) with the PROI copy and IMC calendar, and collaborated on a guide to medieval Irish history. In her role with the IMC, Griffith was also involved in negotiations with the minister for justice, attempting to reduce the closed period for public records from fifty to forty years, and in lobbying the minister for education for new legislation for preserving departmental and local authority records.
In 1969 the report of Public Service Organisations Review Group (commonly known as the Devlin report) proposed that the PROI’s functions be split between the National Library, the Land Registry and Registry of Deeds. In the wake of prolonged state neglect this threat to the archive, whose interests she had worked so hard to protect, may have hastened Griffith’s decision to take early retirement from the PROI in 1971. She then worked as senior library assistant in TCD’s library (1972–7), where she indexed the entire collection of college muniments, its deeds and other administrative documents, creating entries for over 10,000 person- and place-names.
Griffith delivered occasional public talks on history and archives, and appeared on Radio Éireann (1955) speaking about Easter in Cyprus. She remained single and had no children, was a keen traveller, fluent Irish speaker and gifted pianist. She lived for a time at 20 St Alban’s Park, Ballsbridge, before moving to 14 Beechfield Haven, Shankill, Co. Dublin. Margaret Griffith died on 7 July 2001 at St Columcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown, Co. Dublin, from complications following a hip fracture and was cremated at Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin, on 12 July 2001. At the time of her death, she was working on a second volume of the calendar of exchequer inquisitions.