Irish Distillers was the first Irish commercial organisation to partner with the DRI and today marks the first transfer of digitised, freely accessible archival records under the partnership
Irish Distillers, producer of some of the world’s most well-known and successful Irish whiskeys, has today announced the availability of over 22,000 legal agreements between Irish publicans and the firm John Jameson & Son from the 1920s–1960s as part of its partnership with the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).
The publication of these images is part of Irish Distillers’ partnership with the DRI which was first announced in 2023. The DRI is the national body charged with providing long-term, sustained digital preservation and access to Ireland’s humanities, cultural heritage and social sciences data. The files are now available to access for free on the DRI website. It is hoped the records will be used by researchers to help build a picture of a vanished Ireland with the pub at its heart.
The “Jameson Publican Agreements”, which are comprised of 27 digitised volumes, each containing approximately 1,500 individual contracts, are legal agreements between John Jameson & Son and publicans who bought whiskey in bulk in Ireland in the first half of the 20th century.
Traditionally, Jameson had two routes to market. One was to bottle in-house and sell directly to the consumer, while the second was to sell by the barrel to publicans. With the latter, labels were supplied to the individual publicans by the Bow Steet Distillery and publicans would bottle the whiskey in-house and add their name to the label.
To ensure that the whiskey was not tampered with in any way, publicans were required to sign an annual legal agreement which had to be witnessed, and often signed, by a customer on the premises. These agreements, now scanned and digitally accessible, are therefore a unique record of Irish pubs and Irish society at the time, as they include the names and occupations of the witnesses to the agreements. For example, professions now rendered non-existent, such as ostlers (people employed to watch your horse while you stayed at an inn) are mentioned.
Irish Distillers was the first Irish commercial company to partner with the DRI. The partnership will continue to see records from the Irish Distillers archive digitised and uploaded to the repository and made openly available from anywhere in the world. Preserving these important records for the long-term will offer researchers and the public alike a unique insight into Irish history: including social and industrial heritage, food and drinks history, as well as design culture.
Head of Archives at Irish Distillers, Carol Quinn said:
We are incredibly proud to partner with the Digital Repository of Ireland to make these fascinating Jameson records accessible to both academics and the wider public. This is a completely unique set of records in the history of Irish distilling and gives an insight both into the sale of Jameson whiskey throughout Ireland in the first half of the 20th century and the eclectic customer base of those pubs – although it’s a bit disconcerting to find chemist’s assistants and bank officials in the pub in the middle of the day!
We recognised the wider research value of this exceptional archive, not just for whiskey enthusiasts, but for those interested in Ireland’s social, commercial, and geographic history. That’s why we chose to work with the DRI to make these records as accessible as possible. We’re excited to see how researchers make use of this incredible resource in the years ahead.
DRI Director Dr. Lisa Griffith said:
We are delighted to work with Irish Distillers to digitally preserve and share this wonderfully rich collection. It has the potential to prompt a whole new set of questions for researchers and the public alike. We commend Irish Distillers for investing time and resources to make these records openly available and in doing so ensuring that they are freely available and meet the highest archival standards for digital records through the DRI. Our remit is to make Ireland’s digital heritage accessible to researchers and the public and we look forward to seeing how these records will inform future research and compliment the other collections that we hold.
The images are available to view in the Repository at https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/fq97nr65f
