For the most part the report is of a fairly mundane nature, detailing day-to-day issues associated with the policing of a large city like Dublin but now and again Flint’s report (without meaning to) provides us with some fascinating and often humorous glimpses of what life must have been like in the city during the period leading up to the Great Famine.
Commenting on the sometimes infirm nature of some of the old watchmen policing in Dublin prior to the formation of the DMP, Flint details the case of a character named ‘Badojos Kavanagh’. Kavanagh had apparently been a member of the old parish watch and was taken into the DMP despite having lost one of his hands some years earlier. The lack of a hand was only discovered a few years later when Badojos fell sick on the job and a police doctor tried to take his pulse. When the doctor asked Kavanagh who had passed him as fit for duty he replied, ‘You did!’
Flint’s report also contains an interesting table which gives an analysis of 257 dismissals from the DMP between April 1838 and January 1839. The vast majority of the dismissals were drink-related: thirty members were dismissed for being drunk on the beat, eleven for being drunk in bed, nine for being drunk in a brothel, two for being drunk and quarrelling with the artillery and four for being found ‘Drunk asleep in a covered car’.
One member was dismissed for double-jobbing, being found ‘in an oyster shop inviting persons to enter’, another for ‘lying on a guard-bed with a female and [being] abusive’ while two others were thrown out for being ‘found in a brothel with uniform on’.
In the event of being assaulted in the course of duty, DMP men were entitled to compensation for their injuries. One constable, Owen Carolan, was dismissed in December 1838 for ‘cutting his great coat, belt and blue coat and pretending himself stabbed’.
Flint also mentions the exploits of the fire police division of the DMP, which seems to have been the Dublin version of the ‘Keystone Cops’. Flint said this particular branch of the DMP ‘has proved itself an utterly inefficient body as a Fire Police … wretched management and bad judgement has been shown at all our fires; there have been too many officers giving instructions, each urging his own crude plan …’
Flint acknowledged that while many members of the Fire Police showed great personal courage, others were often found to be drunk while attending fires and he mentioned one particular incident that took place during a fire in Dorset Street on 7 January 1839.
An inquiry established afterwards that while ‘a great number of men behaved in an exemplary manner at the fire in Dorset Street; they regret to say that many cases of intoxication took place at that fire’.
Three police constables, Thomas Holland, Joseph Burn and Jacob Doyle were found drunk in the cellar of a burning house in Dorset Street while their comrades were outside fighting the fire. Holland and one of the other constables were found to have stolen four bottles of wine from the cellar. The three men were dismissed from the force the following day but were reinstated just two weeks later.
St Audoen’s
Just inside the last remaining gate and archway of the old walled city of Dublin, at the top of ‘the forty steps’ is St Audoen’s church in High Street, which is one of Dublin’s oldest churches. The present building was constructed sometime around 1190, but it has been suggested that this was built on the site of a much earlier church. The church, built in honour of Audoen or Owen, the seventh-century patron saint of Normandy, is the oldest medieval parish church in Dublin still in use today.
The church was associated with the guilds of the city for many years and it had a particular association with the guild of St Anne, which was authorised to build a chapel dedicated to the memory of the saint in 1430. St Audoen’s Arch, also called the ‘Town’s Arch’, was also an established meeting place for several other Dublin guilds such as those of the smiths, butchers, bakers, bricklayers and the feltmakers. The meetings were held in a tower over St Audoen’s Arch.
John Gilbert informs us that in 1755 Reverend Cobbe, rector of St Audoen’s, for some reason removed the cross from the church steeple and had it replaced with a boar’s head wearing a crown, which led to the following verse believed to have been penned by Jonathan Swift:
Christ’s Cross from Christ’s church cursed Cobbe hath plucked down,
And placed in its stead what he worships – the Crown.
Avenging the cause of the Gadarene People,
The miscreant hath placed a swine’s head on the steeple;
By this intimating to all who pass by,
That his hearers are swine, and his church but a stye.
The main evidence that there was an earlier church on the site of St Audoen’s is provided by an ancient gravestone situated just inside the main door of St Audoen’s. The gravestone, known as the ‘Lucky Stone’, dates from the seventh or eighth century and has a long association with St Audoen’s.
The Lucky Stone was believed to have magical properties and in medieval times many queued to touch the stone or kiss it in the hope of gaining a cure from illness or good fortune. It has been written that many High Street merchants and traders who believed that it brought good fortune to their businesses, visited the stone daily ‘which they kissed and thus a portion of the stone became smooth and polished.’
During the early part of the fourteenth century, John le Decer, lord mayor of Dublin, erected a drinking fountain in the Cornmarket and had the stone placed beside it.
Over the centuries, the Lucky Stone has gone on walkabout on occasion but has always returned to St Audoen’s. It went missing for a while in 1826 but later turned up on a building site in Kilmainham. It was apparently spotted by a watchman who reported that he had seen the stone glow and assume human form after nightfall. Workmen on the site also alleged that the stone cried and moaned and rocked from side to side when they tried to break it up with a sledgehammer!
Some years later the stone turned up at St Audoen’s Catholic church, next door, and later found temporary homes in Glasnevin Cemetery and Whitefriar Street Church. It eventually ended up back in its original position in 1888 and the stone was finally fixed into its present position in order to prevent any more wanderings.
The Lucky Stone is still on display at St Audoen’s and the church, which has undergone a complete refurbishment in recent years, now has conducted tours which are available between May and September.
Copper-Faced Jack
‘Copper-Faced Jack’ Scott, earl of Clonmel, lived at Harcourt Street in Dublin and he would probably be spinning in his grave today at the thought of his name being immortalised by a Harcourt Street nightclub of the same name.
Scott, the Tipperary-born hanging judge, who gained his nickname because of his ruddy complexion, was one of the nastiest but most colourful characters of eighteenth century Dublin. During a chequered career, he managed to obtain for himself the positions of solicitor-general, attorney-general, prime sergeant, lord chief justice and finally ended up as Lord Clonmel.
According to Jonah Barrington, Scott was forever making good resolutions to abstain from excessive ‘snuff, sleep, swearing, gross eating, sloth, malt liquors and indolence,’ and never to taste ‘anything after tea but water, and wine and water at night’. These promises usually came to nothing as he still required ‘a couple of able-bodied lacqueys to carry him nightly to his bed’.
Scott had a reputation for being extremely arrogant and rude, and during his career he made many enemies. One of these was John Magee, proprietor of the Dublin Evening Post, whom Scott had jailed on a libel charge. It was believed at the time that Clonmel bore ill-will against Magee for having personally abused him in his paper. Magee swore to get even and on his release from prison he had posters erected around Dublin informing the citizens that he intended to spend £10,000 getting even with Copper-Faced Jack.
And get even he did! Lord Clonmel owned a villa called Temple Hill near Seapoint in County Dublin. Magee bought a plot of land which was nearly under his lordship’s windows and put up notices, inviting his fel
low citizens to ‘days of great amusement’ to be held there every weekend.
Lord Cloncurry who lived nearby, attended one of these gatherings and described the mayhem that unfolded: ‘Several thousand people, including the entire disposable mob of Dublin, of both sexes, assembled as the guests at an early hour in the morning, and proceeded to enjoy themselves in tents and booths erected for the occasion. A variety of sports were arranged for their amusement, such as climbing poles for prizes, running in sacks, grinning through horse-collars, asses dressed up with wigs and scarlet robes, dancing dogs in gowns and wigs as barristers, and so forth, until at length, when the crowd had obtained its maximum density, towards the afternoon, the grand scene of the day was produced.’
For the grand finale, Magee produced several slippery pigs and let them loose in the direction of Clonmel’s property, announcing that if anybody could catch one, they could keep it. With that, the entire crowd set off in hot pursuit of the pigs through Lord Clonmel’s beautifully manicured gardens, destroying hedges, shrubs and flower beds in the process.
While these gatherings were of great annoyance to Copper-Faced Jack, they were not riotous enough to be deemed a public nuisance as they were held on Magee’s own land and the authorities refused to take any action. His lordship eventually had the last laugh when he subsequently jailed the increasingly eccentric Magee for contempt of court.
Copper-faced Jack Scott died at the age of fifty-nine on the day the ’98 rebellion broke out, on 23 May 1798, and was buried at St Peter’s churchyard in Aungier Street. He died as he himself described in his diary ‘a helpless, ignorant, unpopular, accursed individual: forsaken by government, persecuted by parliament, hated by the bar … and deserted by your oldest friends.’
City Scavenger
The issue of bin collections and waste disposal in Dublin is currently exercising the minds of politicians and citizens alike but the city’s streets bear little or no resemblance to the highways and byways of ‘dirty old Dublin’ in medieval times.
In medieval Dublin there were no flush toilets and the streets were open sewers. Pigs, cattle, sheep and horses roamed freely. Butchers and fishmongers carried on their respective trades out in the open which resulted in heaps of rotting flesh being disposed of all over the city.
Responsibility for keeping the city clean was – as it still is – in the hands of the municipal corporation of Dublin and for the authorities, the problem of waste disposal was a constant one.
An important person employed by the city in its fight against grime was the City Scavenger and one of the best-known holders of this salubrious post was a Dublin widow, Kate Stronge, who inherited the job from her dead husband.
Although it was Kate’s job to look after the sanitation of the city she became notorious as one who did more to clean out the pockets of its citizens than clear up the streets. The City Scavenger was allowed to extract reasonable tolls from the citizens in order to pay for the cost of cleaning the streets but during her time in office many citizens accused Kate and her hired henchmen of extortion.
Sir James Carroll, who was mayor of Dublin in 1634, complained in a letter to the British viceroy, the earl of Wentworth, about Kate’s behaviour on two grounds. His first complaint was in relation to her extortion activities in the city market: ‘She had but only the toll of the market granted to her, and yet she doth continually extort on poor people coming to the market with butter, eggs, cheese, wool, fish, roots, cabbages, and almost all things that come to the market, from whom she takes what she pleaseth …’
The mayor, who wanted the viceroy to remove Kate from office, also complained about her neglect of the city streets, saying: ‘She is so much affected to profit as she will never find sufficient carriage to take away the dung, for where six carts are few enough to take away the dung of the city every week to keep it clean, she did and will maintain but two, which can scarce keep the way from the castle to the church clean …’
Concerns about the City Scavenger’s behaviour had begun two years earlier with a petition to the City Assembly that Kate had emptied so much dung into the river near ‘George Beddely’s garden’ that small boats could only approach the quay (Wood Quay) during a spring tide.
Further complaints were made against Kate and two of her agents, James Bellewe and John Butcher, again in 1634, that they were extorting payments from fish sellers and many other stall holders in the city.
Despite the complaints, the city was unable to dislodge Kate from office and she even managed to outlast the mayor of Dublin, who had complained to the viceroy about her behaviour. Sir James Carroll was removed from office and jailed for fraud and corruption in 1635.
Meanwhile, Kate continued on her merry way until 1641 when she was eventually dismissed from her post for using an illegal brass measure for taking tolls at the market.
Molyneux House
Molyneux House, which once stood at the corner of Peter Street and Bride Street, was built in 1711 by Thomas Molyneux, the first Irish State physician and physician-general to the English army in Ireland. Molyneux was born in Dublin on 14 April 1661 and he received the first part of his education at a school maintained by a Dr Henry Ryder. He graduated with a doctorate in medicine from Trinity College in 1687.
Molyneux went to live in Chester for a few years, where he practiced as a doctor, and he returned to Dublin after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. He established a successful medical practice at his father’s house in New Row in the Liberties and he later became a fellow of the College of Physicians as well as professor of medicine at Trinity.
As well as his interest in medicine, Molyneux also took a keen interest in the natural sciences and he had a particular fascination for the anatomy of animals. He published the first treatise on the anatomy of the giant Irish elk, entitled A discourse concerning the large horns frequently found underground in Ireland. He also wrote papers concerning insects swarming in Longford, strange outbreaks of eye diseases at Delvin, in Westmeath, and in 1715 he published a discourse on an elephant’s jaw that was discovered in Cavan. Thomas’ interest in elephants was shared by his brother William who wrote an account of the accidental burning to death of an elephant in Dublin in 1681.
Molyneux was married twice and he had four children from the first marriage and twelve from the second. So it’s not at all surprising that he needed to build such a large house in Peter Street, which was then a very fashionable part of the city to live in. Peter Street was just a stone’s throw away from the archbishop of Dublin’s Palace of St Sepulchre in Kevin Street and only spitting distance from St Bride’s Church where many of Molyneux’s children were baptised.
When Thomas Molyneux died in 1733, various members of his family continued to live at the house in Peter Street until 1778 when Thomas’ son, Capel, moved to Merrion Square.
Molyneux House – once said to have been one of the most imposing in Dublin – was later sold to an entrepreneur named Philip Astley, who wanted to build an amphitheatre close to the centre of town for his variety shows. These included ‘several feats and entertainment of horsemanship, musical pieces, dancing, tumbling, and pantomime of whatever nature or sort whatever’.
It was later sold to Henry Johnstone who hoped to turn it into a theatre that would rival Smock Alley and Crow Street. When this venture ultimately failed, the property reverted to the Molyneux family. In 1815, the house was leased to a charity for the blind and it was converted to accommodate anything up to fifty blind women, while the playhouse, which had formerly housed Shakespearean actors and dancing horses, was now converted into a chapel.
The Molyneux Blind Asylum was open to all religious persuasions and catered for all ages. Those lucky enough to find a place in the asylum were taught how to make straw ropes and curtain sashes while some of the younger ones were taught to play the piano so that they could obtain work as organists at various churches around the city.
The asylum was relocated to what was regarded as a healthier location at Leeson Str
eet in 1862 and Molyneux House was used as a hospital and by the Salvation Army, who converted it for use as a night refuge. Molyneux House was demolished in 1943 by Jacobs Biscuits, but part of the old chapel still remains and was incorporated into a new building erected on the site during the 1970s.
Kilgobbin
While the ancient south Dublin district of Kilgobbin is fast disappearing under an avalanche of house building, many relics of its fascinating past are still intact today. With its ruined castle, church and remnants of the old Pale ditch, Kilgobbin is an oasis of antiquity in one of the city’s fastest-developing suburbs.
The old church of Kilgobbin, which overlooks the village and castle of Kilgobbin, is built on the site of an earlier ecclesiastic site, believed to originate from as early as the seventh century. Not an awful lot is known about the origins of the founder of the church but Ball, in his History of the County Dublin, states that it was founded by St Gobban, who is mentioned in The Martyrology of Tallaght and The Martyrology of Donegal . Another legend suggests that the church was linked with the famous Gobán Saor, the master-builder of Irish mythology, who is said to have been the builder of many churches and monastic settlements throughout Ireland.
There was a church on the site during the twelfth century which was referred to as Teach na Breathnach, which has been translated as ‘the house of the Welshmen’, perhaps signifying the presence of a settlement of Welsh monks on the site.
The ruins of the most recent church built on the site nearly 300 years ago can still be seen today. There are two old graveyards in the immediate vicinity of the church. Just beside the entrance to the older one stand the remains of a granite high-cross which bears features similar to other Christian crosses that date from the ninth or tenth century. The cross was originally found inside the churchyard by gravediggers in the nineteenth century, which gives us a further indication that it was used as a burial ground from a very early period.
Hidden Dublin Page 12