Francis Joseph Bigger

The Belfast politician Joseph Biggar changed the spelling of his surname from Bigger to Biggar (when he converted to Catholicism), which caused people some confusion in the spelling of Francis Joseph Bigger's surname.[2]

Bigger was born in 1863, in Belfast on Little Donegal Street.[2] He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, one of whose original governors at its foundation in 1810 was his grandfather David Bigger, and one of whose governors during his education there was his father.[2][3]

Bigger joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club, and was later its secretary and its president.[2] He became a solicitor in 1888,[1] and was also a freemason.[4] He also helped to organize the Glens Feis, a feis at Cushendall, out of a desire to promote Gaelic culture that also saw him join, and become a member of the executive committee of, the Gaelic League.[2][4]

Bigger revived the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, after a hiatus of 30 years, which he then edited from 1894 to 1914.[1][2] His interest in archeology remained noted by archeologists a century later, with sites that he had dug being known informally as "well and truly Biggered".[5][6]

In 1911, Bigger bought Jordan's Castle in Ardglass which he restored, and bequeathed to the state.[2]

As an architect, Bigger wrote a complaint to the Irish Independent, published on 2 March 1907, about plans for some cottages, in response to which the Independent invited him to present his own plans.[7] He drew these up and the Independent then published as Labourers' Cottages for Ireland (Bigger 1907).[7] Writer Jonathan Bell characterized these as the plans of an "eccentric antiquarian", as they deliberately excluded sinks from the design, Bigger claiming that "washing up is usually done in a bucket".[8]

Regular visitors to his home in Belfast, Ardrigh House number 737b on Antrim Road, were Douglas Hyde, Roger Casement, and Francis McPeake, for the latter of whom Bigger arranged lessons in Irish traditional pipe music from John O'Reilly of Galway, paying for the lodgings in Belfast of McPeake and O'Reilly, and giving additional money to O'Reilly's family.[2][5] (A description of Ardrigh House can be found in chapter 4 of Joseph Connolly's Memoirs, Connolly & Gaughan 1996, p. 76, listed in further reading.[5] Bigger himself spelled its name "Airdrie" in correspondence,[5] and it was demolished in 1986 in order to build a block of flats.[9]) There is a long list of such visitors, known as the "Ardrigh coterie", including Stephen Gwynn, Padraic Colum, Anna Isabel Johnston, and Alice Leticia Milligan.[10][11][12] Bigger was the patron, and first president, of the Ulster Literary Theatre that was founded by in 1902 by another such, Bulmer Hobson.[13][14] This patronage extended to financing the theatre's journal, which was named Uladh (the word for Ulster in Irish, in the genitive), and writing an article (Bigger 1904) for its first issue in 1904.[14]

Bigger financed another visitor's, Herbert Hughes's, Songs of Uladh which was published in 1904 and was the result of a holiday to Donegal taken by Bigger, who brought along Hughes and the two brothers John Patrick Campbell and Joseph Campbell.[10] Hughes noted down the melodies of various folk songs during the holiday, which were then published in the Songs with words by Joseph and illustrative woodcuts by John.[10]

Bigger strove to improve the standards of public houses, founding the Ulster Public House Association (a.k.a. the Ulster Public House Trust or Ulster Public House Reform Association).[2][5] For his contributions to local history and archeology, Queen's University Belfast awarded him a master's degree in 1926.[15] He died at home in 1926.[1][2]

The front cover of Bigger's 1921 The Birds of Ardrigh has a photograph of Ardrigh, Bigger's house, taken from its south garden. This copy is in the University College Dublin's Special Collections.

A strong supporter of the revival of Irish language and culture, he wrote on those and many aspects of the archaeology of Northern Ireland.[1] His best-known work is The Ulster Land War of 1770, and he also edited and contributed articles to the aforementioned Ulster Journal of Archaeology.[1]

Other works include his booklet The Hills of Holy Ireland, a diatribe against the British rule of Ireland that was based upon a lecture that Bigger gave in the Linen Hall Library, which was on display in the Belfast Central Library from 2007 to 2008 as part of an exhibition.[2] He also wrote pamphlets entitled Irish Penal Crosses and The Northern Leaders of 98, a novel Aeneas O’Haughan, a collection of fireside stories Four Shots from Dawn.[5]

With Herbert Hughes, Bigger also made a collection of just under 175 rubbings of the heraldic designs engraved on gravestones in County Antrim, which they published in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1900 and 1901.[16]

There is a partial list of Works by Francis Joseph Bigger at Open Library. Others not listed there and not aforementioned include:

• Bigger, Francis Joseph; Fennell, William J. "Antiquities". In Bigger, Francis Joseph; Praeger, R. Lloyd; Vinycomb, John (eds.). A guide to Belfast and the counties of Down & Antrim. (Antiquities at the Internet Archive)
• Bigger, Francis Joseph (1907). Labourers' Cottages for Ireland. Dublin: Independent Newspapers Limited.
• Bigger, Francis Joseph (1904). "Art and Culture in Old Belfast". Uladh. Vol. 1 no. 1. p. 12.

John Smyth Crone edited his Articles and Sketches (Bigger 1927), a selection of just some of his work, that was published after his death.[17]

Other people's works that they dedicated to Bigger include Cathal O'Byrne’s As I Roved Out and George A. Birmingham’s The Northern Iron.[5]

A catalogue of his personal collection at his death is in Hackett, Moore & Lauder 1930, which runs to 302 pages. This comprised a significant fraction of the 1956 Catalogue of Belfast Central Library,[5] the Bigger Collection having been presented to the Belfast Central Library by Bigger's brother (Lietenant Colonel F.C. Bigger) a year after his death.[2][4][17] The collection in the BCL runs to 10,000 books and journals, 3,500 letters of correspondence, and 180 boxes of scrapbooks, maps, and pamphlets.[2] A further collection of 5,000 photographs is held separately at the Ulster Museum.[2]

The bookplates that he used for his books have the motto: "Giving and Forgiving".[2]

The curator of the 2007–2008 exhibition about him at the Belfast Central Library, Roger Dixon, described him as a "one man Irish Cultural Institute" in an accompanying pamphlet entitled Ireland's Cultural Visionary.[2]

In the National Library of Ireland, photographs of his home, family, and associates are Ms. 21,543; and miscellaneous papers of his are Ms. 21,542. Other papers of his are held at the Linen Hall Library and at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.[17]