Two Deaths on Sackville Street: Choosing a Source Under Time Pressure
You are answering a documents-based question on the Dublin Lockout of 1913. Your teacher supplies three sources and asks: 'Which source best supports the claim that police killed two workers during the baton charge in Sackville Street on 31 August 1913?' Source A is a leader from a Dublin daily newspaper published the next morning; the paper's largest shareholder was also a director of the tram company. It calls the charge 'a firm and necessary restoration of order' and states that 'no serious injuries were reported'. Source B is a sworn statement given that week by a striker, naming two men he says were beaten to death and describing the scene. Source C is a table from a modern academic study: it records two registered deaths on 1 September, both following coroners' inquests whose verdicts cited police baton blows. You have 30 minutes and 250 words.
1. You must open your answer by naming the source you would cite first and the source you would trust least. Make both choices and justify them.
Read the worked answer
Cite first: Source C. Treat with most caution: Source A.
The reasoning runs in four steps.
- Fit to the exact claim. The claim is that police killed two workers. C records two deaths and inquest verdicts citing baton blows, so it addresses that claim directly rather than circling it.
- Purpose and interest. C was compiled for scholarly record-keeping, not to win an argument in 1913. A was published by a paper whose major shareholder sat on the tram company board; its purpose was to defend the police and the employer. B comes from an interested party on the opposite side.
- Proximity and checking. B was sworn in the same week; C rests on records made at the time; A was written within hours, which is close to the event but also least checked.
- Corroboration. B and C agree on the central fact, and C's inquest detail is independent of B's account, so the two reinforce each other.
Cautions that earn marks. C is a modern summary, so a strong answer says you would cite the underlying inquest record if it survives; a table can compress evidence and drop the doubt. A is not worthless - it is excellent evidence of how the company and its press wanted the event read, which is a different question from what happened.
2. A classmate argues: 'Source B is useless because the striker is biased.' Evaluate this argument.
Read the worked answer
The argument confuses bias with worthlessness, and that confusion is the thing being tested.
Every source is angled. The real question is: angled towards what, and does that angle corrupt the particular claim I am using it for?
- As evidence of the fact-claim (two men died from baton blows), B is weakened by interest but not destroyed. The striker had no power to shape the official record, had little to gain from inventing names that could be checked, and his account matches C on the central point.
- As evidence of experience and mobilisation, B is strong. It shows how strikers understood the police, what they told each other, and what they were prepared to swear to. A historian of 1913 public opinion needs B precisely because it is partisan.
- The word 'biased' is a blunt instrument. Better: 'this source has an interest in presenting the police as violent'. Then you can ask whether the interest produced distortion in this instance.
A better classmate sentence would be: 'B is an interested source, so I use it for the striker's perspective and corroborate its factual claims against C.' That is a judgement, not a dismissal.
3. Rewrite the exam question so that Source A becomes the best source, and explain what that shows about source selection.
Read the worked answer
Rewritten question: 'How did the tram company and its supporters in the press present the baton charge to the reading public, and why?'
Under that question A is the best source available, because it is a direct product of the very thing being studied - the employer's public framing. Its interest stops being a defect and becomes the point.
- A now answers the question fully: language ('firm and necessary restoration of order'), omission ('no serious injuries were reported'), and audience (a mass-circulation daily read by exactly the people the company needed to persuade).
- C would now be nearly useless; an academic mortality table says nothing about press framing.
- B would become supporting evidence of the gap between the framing and the experience it concealed.
What this shows. 'Best source' is never a property of a document in isolation. It is a relationship between a source and a question. Historians select sources after they have decided what they want to know, and an exam answer that ranks sources without stating the question it is answering is guessing. The most common lost mark in documents questions is a candidate who evaluates reliability in general terms instead of asking 'reliable for what?'