Come Here To Me!

My last article looked at the morbid tale of the soldier who got lost in the crypts of Christchurch and was eaten alive by rats. This story is often told in connection with the alleged tunnel that ran from Christchurch to the area where the Four Courts is today.

In 1224 the Dominicans (the Black Friars) established St Saviour’s Priory by the present location of Inns Quay on the Northside of the Liffey. They took over possession a small chapel which had been built four years previously. The priory’s extensive grounds reached to the corner of Cuckoo Lane and George’s Hill.

They built a bigger, more suitable church in 1238 but this fell victim in 1304 to one of Dublin’s periodic fires.

The priory buildings were taken over in 1539 under Henry VIII for use at first as courts of law, and then as a hostel for lawyers under the title of “King’s Inns”. The lawyers retained a chapel within the former priory for their private use. In later years, apart from its brief restoration to the friars in the time of James II, the priory was used in turn as a barracks, a theatre, a publishing centre.

In 1786 the present Four Courts building was erected on the site.

In 1860 it was reported in an article, ‘On the Wells in or near Dublin, Attributed to or Named after St. Patrick’, published in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1836-69) that:

It was in Mr Bailie’s Timber Yard, corner of George’s Hill and Cuckoo-Lane, in a vault, approached by a great flight of stairs, also leading to a vaulted chamber which appears to have been an ancient church.

The local tradition leads to the conclusion that these vaults extend to a great distance, south to the Liffey, and westwards to Thief’s Hole, near the Park Gate, which was opened about thirty years ago, when it was examined by the police, in consequence of a report that the body of a murdered female had been hid therin.

Another source (The Annals of Dublin, 1987) suggests that it was in 1890 that workmen found the 150 feet long tunnel heading for the Liffey. This was alleged to have been the ancient passage which ran under the river to connect with the crypt of Christ Church.

In the fantastic Life in old Dublin, historical associations of Cook street (1913), James Collins wrote:

The building of the Four Courts … has removed all traces of the Dominican Priory … save (those) still under ground, several of which are known to exist in the locality starting from North King Street towards the river.

One of the most interesting was up to some years ago in a good state of preservation, after a lapse of 700 years. It consisted of a series of lofty semi-circular and round arches, built on massive piers, which are approached by a descent of large steps built in what was, up to a short time ago, known as Bailey’s timber yard, George’s Hill.

Opposite to the steps and in the first vault is a deeply arched recess in which there is a well of the purest water, said to be dedicated to St. Anne, from whom the adjoining street derives its name. On the left of the entrance vault is a built-up opening, which closes a vaulted passage, and tradition tells us that this passage extended to Christ Church, being tunneled under the river, and used at a remote period by the monks for the purpose of attending the ceremonials of the Cathedral.

Here’s where the story converges:

It is said that fifty years ago a workman procured a large ball of twine and some candles, and proceeded to explore the passage. He tied the end of the twine at the entrance, unwinding it as he went along, until he reached, as he considered, as far as Ormond Quay, when he was obliged to return, being driven back by foul air. The entrance was closed up in consequence of this exploit.

So, while the dates are varying, there are three sources pointing to a tunnel being found at the corner of Cuckoo Lane and George’s Hill sometime between 1830 and 1890.

Interestingly, there is a similar story about an underground tunnel from St. Mary’s Abbey to Christ Church. Richard Robert Madden, historian of the United Irishmen, wrote in 1843 about vaults in St. Mary’s Abbey where:

…there is some traditional record of their leading by a tunnel passage under the Liffey, to the vaults of Christ Church, a tradition which I believe was the subject of some inquiry about two years ago on the part of Earl de Grey.

In The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (1855) the “well-known tradition of an ancient communication between (the) Abbey and Christ Church” was mentioned in pasing

However, there is certainly a bit more evidence to suggest there certainly was a tunnel found in the grounds of St Saviour’s Priory (Four Cours area). Whether it ran all the way up to Christ Church is another matter.

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Of the ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ W.B Yeats immortalised, the average Dubliner can name many. In our street names and train stations, hospitals and memorials their names are found across the city and county. Some like Pearse and Connolly are very familiar figures, and have been subject to much study. Others however have managed to escape the same level of evaluation. Incredibly, almost a century on from the event, some of the executed leaders are only now becoming the subject of biographies. One such biography has just recently been released by O’Brien Press, looking at Sean Heuston. It forms a part of their ambitious Sixteen Lives series, and comes from historian and Dubliner John Gibney.

Among the youngest of the executed, Heuston was born in 1891 into Dublin’s inner-city, known as Jack to his siblings and baptised John Joseph. Gibney notes that six of the sixteen executed were Dublin men, with Heuston joined by the Pearse brothers, Michael Mallin, Roger Casement and Joseph Plunkett. Heuston’s working class background is worth pointing out, in a rebellion too often spoken of as a middle class insurrection. Born at 24 Lower Gloucester Street, it is known today as Seán MacDermott street to inner-city Dubliners. This area of the city captures the rise and demise of Dublin better than any other for me. It’s fashionable eighteenth-century existence is very much at odds with what would follow, and as Gibney writes “Dublin has presented a number of faces to the world, but two of the best known go hand in hand, as the splendor of the eighteenth century gave way to the squalor of the nineteenth.” Thirty-two people died of tuberculosis between 1894 and 1897 on this once highly respectable street, and the family moved to Jervis Street, and later to Dominick Street, yet another tenement area. The search for employment was to take Seán out of the city however, and to Limerick, where he succeeded in gaining employment as a clerk with the Great Southern and Western Railway. This offered all kinds of benefits, not least an eight hour day, when compared and contrasted with the precarious nature of work for most young men in Dublin at the time.

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This brilliant story appeared in the Irish Press in December 1972. It has everything. A visiting film crew decided to pack a job in owing to numerous incidents in Dublin, ranging from local youths flinging stones to the locals calling the Gardaí terrified, and some of the cast were even reported to have been ‘acting suspiciously’by worried locals!

In addition to all this, a huge number of prop guns were seized from the production team at Dublin Airport upon arrival! What became of Mother Mafia’s Loving Fold? I’m unable to find any reference to the film online. John Murphy, producer of the film, described it in newspapers at the time as a send up of The Godfather and Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s.

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In the early 1930s, republicans in Dublin and elsewhere waged a campaign of intimidation against publicans who sold Bass ale, which involved violent tactics and grabbed headlines at home and further afield. This campaign occurred within a broader movement calling for the boycott of British goods in Ireland, spearheaded by the IRA. Bass was not alone a British product, but republicans took issue with Colonel John Gretton, who was chairman of the company and a Conservative politician in his day.

In Britain,Ireland and the Second World War, Ian Woods notes that the republican newspaper An Phoblacht set the republican boycott of Bass in a broader context , noting that there should be “No British ales. No British sweets or chocolate. Shoulder to shoulder for a nationwide boycott of British goods. Fling back the challenge of the robber empire.”

In late 1932, Irish newspapers began to report on a sustained campaign against Bass ale, which was not strictly confined to Dublin. On December 5th 1932, The Irish Times asked:

Will there be free beer in the Irish Free State at the end of this week? The question is prompted by the orders that are said to have been given to publicans in Dublin towards the end of last week not to sell Bass after a specified date.

The paper went on to claim that men visited Dublin pubs and told publicans “to remove display cards advertising Bass, to dispose of their stock within a week, and not to order any more of this ale, explaining that their instructions were given in furtherance of the campaign to boycott British goods.” The paper proclaimed a ‘War on English Beer’ in its headline. The same routine, of men visiting and threatening public houses, was reported to have happened in Cork.

It was later reported that on November 25th young men had broken into the stores owned by Bass at Moore Lane and attempted to do damage to Bass property. When put before the courts, it was reported that the republicans claimed that “Colonel Gretton, the chairman of the company, was a bitter enemy of the Irish people” and that he “availed himself of every opportunity to vent his hate, and was an ardent supporter of the campaign of murder and pillage pursued by the Black and Tans.” Remarkably, there were cheers in court as the men were found not guilty, and it was noted that they had no intention of stealing from Bass, and the damage done to the premises amounted to less than £5.

A campaign of intimidation carried into January 1933, when pubs who were not following the boycott had their signs tarred, and several glass signs advertising the ale were smashed across the city. ‘BOYCOTT BRITISH GOODS’ was painted across several Bass advertisements in the city.

Throughout 1933, there were numerous examples of republicans entering pubs and smashing the supply of Bass bottles behind the counter. This activity was not confined to Dublin,as this report from late August shows. It was noted that the men publicly stated that they belonged to the IRA.

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Twice now in recent weeks I’ve witnessed people frantically searching for a bike that just isn’t there any more in Dublin. Like any major city, the robbing of bicycles is somewhat commonplace in Dublin, and many cyclists will have lost a bicycle to more opportunistic Dubliners. There is nothing new about bicycles vanishing on their owners in Dublin of course.

Digging into the archives, I found that the theft of bicycles featured heavily in the Irish media in the early twentieth century. This was a time of course when there were many more bicycles in the city. In October 1919, the Irish Independent bemoaned the fact that Dublin was not a city in which a mans bicycle was safe, warning that:

Dublin is getting a bad reputation for the larceny of motors and cycles, in respect of some of which, at all events, the accused have come from across the channel.

“No man”, said the Right Hon. Recorder, “can leave his bicycle without keeping his hand on it in this city.”

The paper was reporting on a court case involving a seaman by the name of John A. Johnson, caught in the act. In court, he gave an address in Liverpool as his own. A seemingly endless cycle (pun intended) of court cases involving stolen bicycles appear in the newspapers of the period, with harsh sentences handed out.

Throughout the 1920s, many Dublin youths were sent to industrial schools for robbing bicycles, with a judge claiming in 1924 that “there would be none of this nefarious robbing of bicycles in Dublin if it were not for ‘receiving merchants'”. A massive black market existed for bicycles in the Dublin of the day, and quite simply the process involved “young lads stealing bicycles which were handed over to other people, changed and disposed of.”

In February 1936, it was claimed in The Irish Times that “hundreds of bicycles were disappearing daily in the city.” The paper claimed that they were “being taken morning after morning from outside churches.” The attitude of authorities was that this was a longstanding problem in Dublin, with six months hard labour seeming a standard punishment at the time for the offence. One judge remarked that “it seems easy to take bicycles, and just as easy to get rid of the stolen bicycles. I would be very happy to have any person charged with receiving stolen bicycles before me, as I consider that the only sentence for these offenders is imprisonment.”

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At the minute, I’m slowly but surely working on a brief article looking at a riot that broke out in Dublin in 1759. A rumour of an impending ‘Act of Union’ with Britain was enough to bring a mob of hundreds to the Irish Parliament, where scenes of madness broke out, with claims that the mob had first assembled in the Liberties and that the infamous ‘Liberty Boys’ were in their midst.

In the course of it all, I stumbled across a great account of the Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys, which was in J.D Herbert’s exciting Irish Varieties, for the Last Fifty Years: Written from Recollections. Published in 1836, it’s an interesting if slightly over the top account of Irish characters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Below is his account of the faction fighting that occurred between the Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys. These gangs were infamous in their day, and have certainly entered Dublin folklore.

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As I have got into a view of subjects so vile and low, that it would, perhaps, never have occurred to any person to record them had had they not been so annoying and offensive to the citizens of Dublin, that it was a risk of life to fall in their way when they were prepared for their abominable sacrifices; and, therefore, I having them strongly before me in recollection, could not, in truth, omit giving a hasty sketch of their actions.

A set of fellows of the lowest description, frequenting Ormond Market, assistants and carriers from slaughter-houses, joined by cattle drivers from Smithfield, stable-boys, helpers, porters, and idle drunken vagabonds in the neighbourhood of Ormond Quay, formed a body of fighting men, armed with falchions as they called them- oak staves of casks hardened by smoking in chimnies, sharpened on one side, and a hole cut in one end to admit a hand to answer for a handle – some preferred shilelahs- but all armed for combat, were prepared to meet the Liberty Boys, a set of lawless desperadoes, residing in the opposite side of the town, called the Liberty. Those were of a different breed, being chiefly unfortunate weavers without employment: some were habitual and wilful idlers, slow to labour, but quick at riot and uproar.

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People make kings and people can unmake them; but what has the King of England to do with stopping a meeting in Dublin? If they like to stop the meeting at the order of Mr. Murphy, Mr. Wm. Murphy will take the responsibility; and, as I have previously told you, for every man that falls on our side two will fall on the other. We have a perfect right to meet in O’Connell Street. We are going to meet in O’Connell Street, and if the police or soldiers are going to stop or try to stop us, let them take the responsibility. If they want a revolution, well then, God be with them.

– Jim Larkin speaking on the eve of a banned demonstration on O’Connell Street, August 1913

I’m delighted to have been asked to say a few words at the launch of a new comic book on Big Jim Larkin, which comes from O’Brien Press. Following on from their graphic novels exploring the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, this new work looks at the Dublin Lockout of 100 years ago. Sharing a stage with Jer O’Leary is always a bit daunting, the last time I done that was in a school in Ringsend, where I saw him captivate an audience of kids with his Larkin performance. Also speaking is Stephen Mooney, a well-established comic book artist and illustrator.

Larkin understood the power of cartoons, which were a constant presence in his Irish Worker newspaper, but he was also ridiculed in the pages of the mainstream media. This great little cartoon comes from the conservative Daily Express in England, who believed politicians in Britain were bowing before the ‘Larking’.

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A visitor to Hawarden in Wales might stumble across a statue in honour of William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time prime minister of Britain. A hugely important figure in nineteenth century Irish political history, Gladstone’s political career spanned over sixty years, with him first taking the office of prime minister in 1868. Gladstone had tried and failed to introduce Home Rule to Ireland, but he was also instrumental in introducing coercion laws into Ireland which allowed for people to be imprisoned without trial, in an attempt to establish “law and order” in Ireland.

In 1898, the Gladstone National Memorial Fund proposed that statues in honour of Gladstone be erected in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. John Hughes was the sculptor chosen for the job at hand. Dubliners will be familiar with Hughes’ statue to controversial Trinity College provost George Salmon, while his monument in honour of Queen Victoria has long been removed from Leinster House. A discussion around acceptance of the statue took place at a meeting of the Dublin Corporation in August 1898, and ultimately the elected members of the Corporation decided against acceptance of the statue, which infuriated the Freeman’s Journal newspaper:

Under the circumstances, it is clear that it is the duty of self-respecting Irishmen to step into the breach, to form a representative committee, to accept the offer of the Duke of Westminster on behalf of the nation, and by the force of public opinion to override the ill-considered and ill-conditioned resolution adopted yesterday. There is no other course open unless Irishmen are to hang their heads in shame for all time at the name of Gladstone.

The actual motion passed by Dublin Corporation is interesting, as it seems the primary cause of concern to the Corporation was the absence of a statue to Charles Stewart Parnell in the city, with their motion stating that “that no statue should be erected in Dublin in honour of any Englishman until as least the Irish people have raised a fitting monument to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell….”

It was not until 1911 that Parnell’s monument was put in place, the work of the reknowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. John Redmond had served as secretary to the Parnell Monument Committee, and huge crowds came to see the unveiling of the statue in October of that year. Poor Parnell, like Daniel O’Connell, was to take a number of bullets in Easter Week. It was there that British Army officers would pose with the captured flag of the Irish Republic, less than five years after the statue had been unveiled.

Ultimately, Hawarden on the Welsh/English border would claim the statue to Gladstone. Far from the city of Dublin, the total population for the greater community of Hawarden was 13,539 at the time of the 2001 census. While the Freeman’s Journal may have felt Dublin had disgraced itself in refusing such a statue, history had shown it may not have stood much of a change in a newly independent state, where symbols of the British state and establishment were routinely targeted in Dublin.

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Back in October 2010, Donal touched briefly on an old Dublin legend about a solder who met a grim fate in the crypt of Christchurch. The story was recounted in Padraic O’ Farrell’s 1983 book The Ernie O’ Malley Story:

“Ernie received a note written by Rory O’ Connor in Mountjoy on 12 September. It told him of a tunnel leading to the Four Courts which could be used if they had left any important documents behind. One piece of folklore attached to that area of the city concerned a tunnel from there to Christchurch, built in the thirteenth century when a Dominican friary of St. Saviour occupied the Four Courts site.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an army officer was accidentally locked in the tunnel which was used for storing ceremonial paraphernalia. He was soon documented as ‘missing, presumed dead’ until the next occasion demanding the opening of the tunnel. Near its entrance was discovered the skeleton of the officer and in the bones of his right hand was his sword. Lying about were the broken bone fragments of up to 250 rats that had attacked and had been beaten off by the mans sword before he himself was overcome.”

From looking at a number of different sources, it seems likely that there is some truth to this macarbe story.

The earliest substantial reference I can find is from 1907. Samuel A. Ossory Fitzpatrick’s book Dublin: A Historical and Topographical Account of the City describes the

…tragic interest attached to the tablet to Sir Samuel Auchmuty, G.C.B., who died in 1822 while in command of forces in Ireland. It is said that at his funeral an officer lost his way in the crypt, was accidentally locked in, and was there devoured by rats, which probably swarmed from the great sewer which led from the cathedral to the Liffey. His skeleton is said to have been afterwards found still grasping his sword,  and surrounded by the bones of numbers of rats which he had slain before being overcome.

Next week, I will focus on the stories about the tunnel that allegedly ran from the crypt of Christchurch Cathederal, under the Liffey, to St Saviours Priory (site of the present Four Courts).

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One of the more peculiar incidents in the course of the 1913 lockout in Dublin was a football clash in Ringsend, when Bohemians and Shelbourne went head to head in a match that occurred early on in the dispute. There was physical confrontation at this clash between trade unionists and football supporters, and the popular story has it that Jim Larkin accused the Bohemians side of having scabs in its ranks. This article aims to look at newspapers (including the organ of Larkin’s movement) from the period and other sources and try to piece together just what happened in Ringsend. It seems to me, that in reality, it was not alone Bohemians but also Shelbourne who Larkin took issue with, and that the story of Bohs alone being singled out by Larkin just doesn’t hold up.

Shelbourne and Bohemians were already two well established working class institutions in Dublin by the time of the 1913 Lockout. Writing in his classic book Dublin Made Me, C.S Andrews noted that at the time of his youth “there were only two senior soccer clubs in Dublin – Bohemians and Shelbourne- and the people on the southside followed Shelbourne.” He went on to write that “the supporters and players of the game were exclusively of the lower middle and working classes”.

The first reference to trouble at a clash between the two sides during the Lockout that I stumbled across was in the pages of Padraig Yeates’ classic account Lockout: Dublin 1913, where it is noted that the a game between the two sides on August 30th saw “about six thousand spectators” gather in Ringsend, where they were met by “a picket of about a hundred tramway men” who had gathered outside the ground and exchanged insults with the football crowd. Yeates quotes The Irish Times who noted that “the members of the Bohemian team, who pluckily drove to the scene of the scene of the match on outside cars through a hostile crowd of roughs, were assailed with coarse epithets.”

By this stage, the dispute between Larkin and William Martin Murphy had been underway for several days. Yet why was their hostility towards these football players? Why was there a picket of striking tramway men in Ringsend that day in the first place? The answer to that is found in the pages of the Irish Worker, where Larkin’s paper had denounced two players publicly as ‘scabs’. He had also allegedly attacked this match in a speech he had delivered the night previously to it, and called on workers not to attend the clash between the sides unless to picket it. Of the two players named in the paper, only one of these players was from Bohs however, Jack Millar. The other player, Jack Lowry, lined up for Shelbourne. This game was actually a charity game to inaugurate the new Shels ground, but with tensions high in Dublin following the outbreak of the tram dispute, it didn’t take much to spark trouble. Trams carrying supporters to the game were attacked, following a failed attempt by protestors to rush the gates into the ground.

One of the most interesting primary sources from the time of the 1913 Lockout is Disturbed Dublin by Arnold Wright, which was written in 1914 and in many ways provided an account of the dispute which was very sympathetic to the employers and police. In that text, Weight notes that:

The opening scene, in what was to prove a prolonged and sanguinary drama, was enacted in the Ringsend district. In his speech on Friday night Mr. Larkin had referred to a football match which was to be played on Saturday on the Shelbourne Ground at Ringsend between two local clubs. ‘ There are ” scabs ” in one of the teams, and you will not be there except as pickets,’ he said, in language whose menacing character was understood by those who heard him. In obedience to the implied command, a large body of members of the Transport Workers’ Union gathered at the time announced for the match near the entrance to the grounds.

Wright’s claim that there were scabs in “one of the teams” is at odds with the claims made in Larkin’s own newspaper.

The Irish Times report on the incident claimed that some picketers had actually gained access to the ground, and “hurled vile language at the players.” It also claimed that the incident involving a crowd attacking trams was only brought to an end when “one of the passengers jumped from the tram, produced a revolver, and effectively dispersed the crowd.” It is noted in Lockout: Dublin 1913 that following this incident:

A section of the crowd, which now numbered between five and six hundred, decided to march on the nearby DUTC power station. At 4.30pm College Street DMP station received a call from an anxious sergeant at the plant appealing for help. Inspector Bannon commandeered a passing tram, put his ten men on board, and headed for Ringsend. By the time he arrived the crowd had quietened and he began shepherding them back towards the centre of Ringsend.

Further trouble escalated quickly however at Bridge Street, where one rioter even succeeded in liberating an inspector of the sword from his scabbard. This led to a police horse falling, bringing its rider down with it. It was not until the pubs in the area were forcibly closed by police before the crowds began to disperse from the area, with the inaugural opening match of Shelbourne’s new ground well and truly overshadowed. In total, sixteen arrests were made at Ringsend that day, with over fifty people treated in hospital for their injuries. The punishments were severe, with Thomas Deevey initially sentenced to “three months’ imprisonment with hard labour for striking a policeman on the leg with a bottle at Bridge Street, Ringsend.”

The newspapers blamed the influence of outside “hooligans” for the actions of the “usually peaceful and industrious inhabitants of Ringsend” on the day, but events on the following day would greatly overshadow what had happened at Ringsend. An outlawed labour meeting on Sackville Street would provide the location for ‘Bloody Sunday’, leaving hundreds injured and one man dead.

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