Hidden Dublin

by Frank Hopkins

  Madame Tussaud

  Almost 250 years after her birth in Strasbourg, Madame Tussaud is still world famous as a wax model exhibitor. But what is not so well known is the fact that she spent four years of her illustrious career based in Dublin.

  Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz, daughter of Johannes Grosholtz and Anna Maria Walder of Strasbourg in 1760 and her father died before she was born. Her mother then took up a post as housekeeper to a young doctor in Berne, Switzerland. Dr Philippe Curtius was a medical doctor who had taken to moulding wax figures to help with his anatomical studies. Curtius soon realised that his talents lay in the artistic world rather than the medical and he also found it to be a much more lucrative vocation.

  He moved to Paris where he opened a small waxworks museum and he took the young Marie on as a trainee. She learned quickly and by the age of eighteen, Marie was making wax models of luminaries such as the French philosopher, Voltaire, and she was also employed as art tutor to a sister of Louis XVI.

  When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 Curtius and Marie were commissioned to make models of some of the leading members of French society who had met their end on the guillotine.

  Curtius died in 1794 leaving his entire waxwork collection to Marie. She married Francois Tussaud the following year. In 1802 she entered into a partnership with a man called Philipstal, who owned a travelling exhibition known as the ‘Phantasmagoria’ and they launched a joint exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1803.

  Following a successful stint in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Madame Tussaud and her son Joseph set sail for Dublin in February 1804 and moved into lodgings at 16 Clarendon Street. She bought out her partner M. Philipstal’s share of the business and established an exhibition at Shakespeare’s Gallery in Exchequer Street.

  Madame Tussaud was evidently pleased with her reception in Dublin as she wrote to her family back in Paris: ‘ … everything is going well. When I am in Dublin the takings can reach £100 sterling a month. People come in crowds every day from 6 o’clock until 10 o’clock …’

  Madame Tussaud decided to take her exhibition on a tour of Ireland and she quite literally decided to ‘test the water’ by travelling to Waterford by sea. On the return trip to Dublin, three ships carrying wax exhibits left Waterford at the same time as the one that Madame Tussaud was travelling on and sank within minutes of leaving the harbour. Although she was uninjured, many of her wax figures were broken and she returned to Dublin where she spent several months repairing and replacing the damaged exhibits.

  She remained in Dublin with her Exchequer Street Exhibition which continued to attract the interest of Dubliners until the spring of 1805. She then took her show on the road again, visiting Cork, Limerick, Galway, Kilkenny, Mullingar and Belfast before returning to Scotland in July of 1808.

  Madame Tussaud had made plans to return to Dublin with her exhibition in 1821 to coincide with a visit to Ireland by King George IV. She left Liverpool on board The Earl of Moira in August of that year but the ship was wrecked not long after it had left Liverpool. Madame Tussaud and her companions were rescued, but many of her precious wax exhibits were washed overboard. Madame Tussaud returned to Liverpool and she never set foot in Ireland again. She died in 1850 at the age of ninety.

  Liffey Ferry

  When the last remaining Liffey ferry made its final journey across the river on 20 October 1984, it brought to an end a tradition that had lasted for at least 700 years. The first documentary evidence of a ferry on the Liffey is found in the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin . Richard II granted to the mayor and citizens of Dublin in 1385, the use of a ferry for a period of four years on the site of the old bridge of Dublin, which had fallen down. The profits from the ferry were to be invested in the re-building of the bridge and the fare was one farthing for each human passenger and a halfpenny for cows and horses rated at twelve pence value and above. Sheep and pigs (dead or alive) were charged a farthing and anything else was negotiable.

  The next mention of a ferry on the Liffey came in 1624 in the Dublin Assembly Roll: when it was recorded that ‘Richard Golburne, merchant, shall alone be licensed to keep a ferry during his natural life on the river of Annaliffe … paying to the city yearly five shillings, and that none shall have a ferry there without the consent of the table of aldermen …’

  In 1634 the assembly was up in arms over a decision imposed on them by the English lord deputy to ‘putt one Amby in possession of the ferry belonging unto this citty, whereby the citty has been altogether dispossessed thereof ’. We don’t know who Amby was, but the city threatened to take the matter to court. However, no further action was taken and the matter appears to have been resolved amicably.

  By 1652 the rights to the Liffey ferry had been granted to one Nathaniel Fowkes, a Dublin tailor. He was granted rights to the ferry which he was to supply himself ‘for the rest of his natural life’ at an annual rate of 8 pounds and 10 shillings. In 1666 Fowkes obtained a ninety-nine year lease of the ferries for the sum of 10 pounds per year.

  His monopoly of the ferries seems to have been resented in some quarters by 1669. Fowkes – by now an alderman himself – made an unsuccessful attempt to get the assembly to take action against named persons who were interfering with his business. Fowkes complained that his ‘boats are dayly stopt and interrupted by Mr Mabbott and colonel Carey Dillon and others’.

  In 1670, the building of a wooden bridge across the Liffey at the bottom of Watling Street (now Rory O’More Bridge) caused controversy because it created competition for the owners of a ferry in the immediate vicinity. The owners arranged for a large group of apprentices to tear the bridge down, but twenty of them were arrested and taken to Dublin Castle. The apprentices were later transferred to the Bridewell but four of them were killed during a rescue attempt. From then on the bridge became known as the ‘Bloody Bridge’. Several attempts were made to change the name to ‘Barrack Bridge’ but it continued to be known locally as the ‘Bloody Bridge’.

  During the early part of the nineteenth century, William Walsh – who built the Ha’penny Bridge with John Beresford – owned the lease on the Liffey ferries. The lease ran out in 1915 and control of the ferries reverted to Dublin Corporation. In 1920 the corporation installed a new ferry service using motorised boats and this service continued until 20 October 1984 when it was closed down.

  Joseph Damer

  Before the advent of banking institutions such as the Bank of Ireland, the financial needs of Dublin’s merchants and the upper classes were met by the many private banks then operating in the city.

  One of the earliest of these banks had its headquarters at the London Tavern in Fishamble Street. This was described in 1667 as ‘a timber house slated, a base court, a back building more backward, and a small garden in Fishamble Street’.

  It was to this salubrious establishment that Joseph Damer, a wealthy young man and former soldier of Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentary army arrived in 1662 and he rented a room from landlord George Hewlett, a former sheriff of Dublin.

  Damer embarked on what was to become a very lucrative and profitable career in the banking and money-lending business. He initially bought a large property in Thurles, Co. Tipperary and stocked it with 10,000 sheep and he also established a candle-making business near Cashel. As soon as his Tipperary business ventures were up and running, Damer brought his nephew over from England to take charge and he returned to the London Tavern where he began to concentrate on his banking business.

  Damer’s activities soon came to the attention of Jonathan Swift, who loathed moneylenders and bankers and he seems to have taken a particular dislike to Damer. So much so, that when Damer died, Swift and his friends composed a very unflattering elegy to the dead banker:

  He walked the streets, and wore a threadbare cloak;

  He dined and supped at charge of other folk;

  And by his looks, had he held out his palms,

  He might be thought an object fit for alms.

&n
bsp; Oh! London Tavern, thou hast lost a friend,

  Though in thy walls he ne’er did farthing spend …

  Damer died at an advanced age in 1720 and the following obituary appeared in Whalley’s Newsletter on 11 July of that year, which contradicted Swift’s view of him: ‘On Wednesday last Mr Joseph Deamer [sic] died at his house in Smithfield upwards of ninety years of age, with not above £340,000, and last night was interred in St Paul’s church in Oxmantown Green attended by a numerous train of gentlemen’s as well as by hackney coaches … I knew him upwards of fifty years, and though his fortune was all his own acquiring I believe that it was every penny got honestly. His purse was open to all he believed to be honest or where he thought his money secure …’

  He had the reputation of being a miser but it emerged later that Damer had given away a great deal of money to deserving causes during his lifetime and funded several charities in the city. He was a member of the Unitarian Church and he funded a charity school attached to the Unitarian church on Stephen’s Green. This establishment was called the Damer School in his honour and it continued to receive funding from his estate until well into the twentieth century.

  Damer also established a house of refuge at 27 Parnell Street for the destitute Protestant widows of St Mary’s parish. The refuge catered for twenty widows, housing them in their own rooms and providing them with a weekly allowance of food, fuel and a small amount of spending money.

  Star-shaped Fort

  The names of Bernard De Gomme and ‘Honest Tom’ Philips are not ones that immediately spring to mind in connection with the development of Dublin, but if these military engineers had had their way back in the late 1600s, the south-east inner city area of Dublin might have looked a little bit different to the way it looks today.

  Following an audacious attack on the British Navy by the Dutch fleet in 1667 on the River Thames, during which several English warships were destroyed, the English government scuttled thirteen ships in the river to act as a temporary blockade while plans were made to strengthen existing defences.

  Sir Bernard De Gomme, described as ‘his majesties chief engineer’, was ordered to put together a plan for the defence of the Thames and he drew up plans to construct a star-shaped fort at Tilbury on the river.

  The star-shaped fort design was all the rage in Europe at the time and it was particularly in vogue with French military engineers. These pentagonal defensive structures, surrounded by straight-sided moats, were designed to have an all-round view, eliminating any possible blind spots from which attacks could be launched.

  In 1672 De Gomme was ordered to Dublin to perform a similar task and he decided to design a huge citadel at the mouth of the Liffey for the defence of the city. In his report to Charles II, De Gomme proposed to build his citadel at Ringsend and link it to the city by the construction of a causeway leading from Ringsend to Lazy Hill (Townsend Street).

  This massive star-shaped construction was to be built on the same principles as De Gomme’s Tilbury Fort on the Thames. Had it been built, the fort would have covered an area of thirty acres and would have been capable of accommodating seven hundred soldiers and officers. Like Tilbury the plan was to incorporate a prison, a chapel, a house for the governor and a large gateway with a drawbridge.

  De Gomme proposed to centre this new fort on an existing defensive tower in the middle of Ringsend and if his proposal had gone ahead, the whole village as we know it today and a large portion of the surrounding area would have been obliterated.

  The scheme never got off the ground, possibly due to the projected cost of over £130,000, which was an enormous amount of money for those times. The cost of building the similar but much smaller-scale Charles Fort in Kinsale, which was built during the same era, only came to just over £10,000.

  Following De Gomme’s death in 1685 the idea to build a citadel was resurrected by ‘Honest Tom’ Philips who suggested a different location for the fortification. Philips had worked with De Gomme on the original map and plan in 1673.

  Philips’ proposed citadel was quite similar to De Gomme’s but he suggested that it be built close to where Merrion Square is now located. It must be borne in mind that the seashore in those days came very close to Merrion Square.

  If Philips’ scheme had gone ahead, the citadel would have been built over an extensive area of Dublin centred on Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square, Baggot Street and Mount Street Upper and Lower.

  This grandiose scheme also came to nothing, which was just as well. Many other European cities had invested heavily in this type of fortification only to find them rendered useless by advances in heavy artillery and ammunition.

  A fort was eventually built at the Pigeon House harbour but on nowhere near the massive scale that had been envisaged by De Gomme and Philips.

  Linen Hall

  The street names of Linenhall Street and Yarnhall Street off Bolton Street are today the only reminders that for much of the eighteenth century Dublin was of central importance to the country’s linen trade.

  Linen weaving has been a feature of Irish life from as far back as the late Bronze Age and it was a particularly important industry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In those days the manufacture of linen in Ireland was a cottage industry and it provided a regular source of income for families in rural areas throughout Ireland.

  The first Linen Board was established in 1711 in order to control the sale of linen and it was originally based in a small rented room on Cork Hill.

  At a meeting of the Linen Board on St Patrick’s Day in 1722 the question of building a centralised Linen Hall was addressed and several prospective sites around the city were considered. One or two sites in Drumcondra were looked at and duly rejected on the basis that they were too far away from the city and more importantly from the Liffey. Another site near Ballybough was rejected for the same reason.

  Another site that was given serious consideration was the ‘Little Green’ where the ‘new’ Newgate Prison was erected many years afterwards in 1780.

  The Board eventually came down in favour of a three-acre site located at the top of Capel Street, which was then on the perimeter of the city. This particular site was chosen because of its proximity to the inns and taverns on Church Street and Pill Lane, where many linen traders lodged while on business in Dublin.

  Over the course of the next six years the Linen Hall gradually took shape and it opened for trade on 14 November 1728.

  The Dublin Linen Hall was modelled on the famous Cloth Hall of Hamburg and the great London market, Blackwell Hill. The Linen Hall contained a large trading floor and 550 compartments or bays for the storage of linen. There was also a large boardroom for the use of the trustees and what was described as ‘a large and elegant coffee-room for the accommodation of factors and traders who daily crowd its courts’.

  Security was tight in the Linen Hall. The market began and ended with the ringing of a large bell and anyone still on the premises after closing time was liable to be kept there overnight. The whole operation was overseen by a chamberlain whose main task was to look after the hundreds of keys required for the Linen Hall’s numerous linen lockers and chambers. Other staff included a uniformed gate-keeper, a clerk and several porters. During the night the premises were guarded by night watchmen who were issued with firearms.

  With the opening of the Belfast Linen Hall in 1783 the Dublin industry went into terminal decline and the Linen Board was abolished in 1828. Thackeray, in his Irish Sketch Book, described a visit to the Linen Hall which was in a near -derelict state in 1842: ‘I need not say how we went to see the Linen Hall of Dublin, that huge, useless, lonely, decayed place in the vast solitude of which stands the simpering statue of George IV. Pointing to some bales of shirting, over which, he is supposed to extend his august protection.’

  During the 1870s the Linen Hall was used as a temporary barracks by the British Army and it was taken over by the board of works in 1878. One of the last events held in the Linen H
all was the Dublin Civic Exhibition of 1914. It was destroyed by fire during the 1916 Rebellion.

  Theatre Riots

  On the night of 14 December 1822, the famous Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street was the scene of a riot, known afterwards as ‘The Bottle Row’, which resulted in four Dublin Orangemen being charged with the attempted murder of the duke of Wellington. This seems to have been a complete overreaction by Dublin Castle as only one missile was reported to have struck the duke’s box and a bottle and several sticks were thrown around the theatre.

  The four accused were George Graham, Henry Hanbridge or Handwich, his brother Matthew and James Forbes and at least half a dozen other were charged with riotous assembly.

  The men, all with addresses in Hawkins Street, were accused of hooting, groaning and hissing at the lord lieutenant, and showering him with sticks, copper pipes and a wide variety of empty glass bottles. Even more seriously, they were charged with conspiracy to ‘kill and murder his Excellency, Richard Marquis Wellesley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’.

  The accused men had decided to stage a protest against Wellesley because he had earlier voiced his disapproval of the practice of decorating King Billy’s (William of Orange) statue in College Green with Orange sashes on the anniversary of his arrival in Ireland. They were also demonstrating against the lord mayor of Dublin, John Fleming, who had banned the practice some weeks earlier.

  The Orangemen had managed to get their hands on one hundred tickets for the play and they kept quiet until the interval when they produced handbills denouncing Wellesley and Fleming with slogans such as, ‘Fleming, although he has the mace, may find it hard to keep his place’, as well as the standard ‘No Popery’ placards.