Bennett's of Ballinacurra Descriptive List (Ref. B609)

B609/

B609/1

CORRESPONDENCE

Business correspondence relating to the running of the malting firm of John H Bennett and Company, including correspondence with Arthur Guinness & Son, Brewers, for which the firm was a commission house for most of its existence, and with customers, suppliers, scientific laboratories, and other correspondence filed as such. B609/1/A provides the fullest continuous record of the relationship between JHB and AGS, covering 1901 to 1990. General correspondence also includes AGS letters, especially letterbooks for the years 1826-29, 1851-1901 (B609/1/B). These letterbooks also contain some personal and estate letters, and Cereal Station-related correspondence. Some series of correspondence have been placed in other sections to which they relate specifically; e.g., Department of Agriculture (B609/6/D, 7/A-B) and Management Committee correspondence (B609/4/C). Owing to the close involvement of AGS in the Department’s experimental work, and its representation on the Management Committee of JHB, many AGS letters also occur in these sub-sections. The correspondence series filed in the present section frequently touch on aspects of JHB and Cereal Station operations documented elsewhere in the collection. For example, there are many letters documenting scientific work and dealings with DoA, which augment the record as presented in Section 7 below. In order to preserve records, as far as possible, in the context in which they were originally filed, ‘mixed’ and ‘general’ files and series have been left intact and placed in the present section. Researchers are advised, however, that an aspect of the business covered elsewhere in the collection may also be partly documented here.