Hidden Dublin

by Frank Hopkins

  Following the closure of the old Kilgobbin cemetery in 1905, a new burial ground was established close by. One of the most interesting characters interred there is Richard ‘Boss’ Croker, Tammany Hall politician and horse-trainer.

  Croker’s finest hour in racing terms came in 1907 when his horse Orby won the Epsom Derby. Orby’s win sparked off major celebrations in Ireland – celebratory bonfires blazed in Sandyford and the drink flowed all night long at the Boss’s expense. The win, in the back yard of the ‘ould enemy’, gave a great lift to Irish people everywhere and one Irishwoman was reported to have approached Croker after the race saying, ‘Thanks be to Jesus and to you Mr Croker, a Catholic horse has at last won the Derby!’

  Such was the excitement caused by the win in Dublin, Croker was awarded the Freedom of the City by the lord mayor a few weeks later. Orby went on to win the Irish Derby and the prestigious Baldoyle Plate and his son Grand Parade won the English Derby in 1919.

  Boss Croker made elaborate plans for his own funeral and when he died on 29 April 1922 his body was laid out in evening dress in the chapel on his Glencairn estate. Although the funeral was a private one his coffin was carried by Arthur Griffith, Oliver St John Gogarty and Alfie Byrne, the lord mayor of Dublin. Unusually, Croker had requested a window at the side of his coffin and he had asked that the bones of his famous racehorse Orby be buried beside him. The coffin was placed in a granite mausoleum on the estate.

  In 1939 the new owners of Glencairn decided to move Croker’s remains to the nearby Kilgobbin cemetery where he was buried alongside his former housekeeper.

  Lepers

  During the Middle Ages one of the most common and widespread transferable ailments found was the dreaded disease of leprosy. The term ‘leprosy’ has its origins in the Latin word liber which is now taken to mean book. In earlier times, however, liber referred to the inner bark of a tree. The name ‘libra’ subsequently began to be used to describe a range of skin diseases because tree bark had similar peeling qualities to diseased skin. In an Irish context, the word used for leper or leprosy is lobhar which is found in the place names of Baile na Lobhar (Leperstown, now Leopardstown) and Tobar na Lobhar (The Leper’s Well).

  The disease was first recorded 2,500 years ago in India and the theory is that it was brought back to Europe by the armies of Alexander the Great, although it was also known in parts of Africa.

  There was huge stigma and fear attached to the disease and lepers were shunned and ostracized. Leprosy was seen as a ‘death before death’ and priests sometimes performed a death ritual for those afflicted. Sufferers were expected to live in isolation and carry bells or clappers to warn people off. Some churches had what were known as ‘squint holes’ in their walls so that lepers could observe proceedings at a safe distance from the other worshippers while one church in Pearse Street even had a special ‘leper balcony’.

  The Anglo-Normans opened leper hospitals all over Ireland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and there were several in Dublin. Ailred the Dane, inspired by a hospital he had seen for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, established the hospital of St John the Baptist just outside the wall of the medieval city of Dublin where Thomas Street now stands. This hospital had a leper hospital attached. In addition to the hospital of St John, there was a hospital for the treatment of lepers in the townland of St Laurence between Chapelizod and Palmerstown.

  The Leper Hospital of St Stephen was located close to the site of the old Mercer’s Hospital near St Stephen’s Green. The owners of the hospital also had a convalescent home at Leopardstown in south Dublin from as early as the year 1230. In that year it was documented that ‘the Master and lepers of the house of St Stephen’ were given the lands by Geoffrey and Sara Tyrell. This gave rise to the area being called Baile na Lobhar or Lepers Town up until the eighteenth century when it was changed to Leopardstown. Perhaps the name change was instigated by eighteenth century land speculators who realised that the association with leprosy wouldn’t have done much for house prices in the area!

  One of Dublin’s earliest hospitals was built on Lazar’s Hill which is now called Townsend Street. The hospital is believed to have been built sometime around 1220 for the use of pilgrims bound for the shrine of St James of Compostella, the patron saint of lepers, in Galicia in northern Spain.

  A lazar was another name for a leper and the road leading to the hospital came to be known as Lazar’s Hill. The name ‘lazar’ comes from the Order of St Lazarus, which was formed by monks in the fourth century to set up ‘lazar houses’ in an effort to combat leprosy.

  Over the centuries, the name of the area underwent several transformations and it has been shown in various maps and documents relating to the area as Lazers, Lazie, Lacey, Lowsie and Lousy Hill. Incidentally, the Irish name for Townsend Street is Sráid Cnoic na Lobhair, meaning the Street of the Hill of the Lepers.

  Maturin

  The author and clergyman Charles Robert Maturin, born in Dublin on 25 September 1782 is best known as the author of the best-selling Gothic classic Melmoth The Wanderer published in 1820.

  Maturin came from a Dublin Huguenot family. He liked to claim that he was the descendant of Peter Maturin who had been found abandoned on a Paris Street by an aristocratic ‘lady of rank’. She apparently gave the child the name of Maturin after the Rue des Mathurins in Paris, the street where the child had been abandoned. Maturin also claimed that Peter later fled to Ireland after serving a lengthy sentence of imprisonment in the Bastille. Several of Peter’s descendants were prominent in the established church in Ireland during the eighteenth century and one of these, Charles Maturin’s grandfather, Gabriel James, succeeded Jonathan Swift as dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral following Swift’s death in 1745.

  Charles attended Trinity College from where he graduated in 1798 with a classics degree. He was ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church in 1803 and was appointed curate of Loughrea in County Galway where he married Henrietta Kingston before returning to Dublin in 1805 to take up the post of curate at St Peter’s parish in Aungier Street.

  Maturin began to write in order to supplement his curate’s miserable income and his first three novels were published under the pseudonym of Denis Jasper Murphy. He also wrote a number of plays. The most successful of these was Bertram , which enjoyed a hugely successful run at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1816, despite receiving a savage review by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  Maturin’s finest hour was the publication of his Gothic masterpiece Melmoth The Wanderer in 1820. The novel – said to have been largely written by candlelight in Marsh’s library – is a tale of madness, alienation, paranoia and terror and is considered by many to be the definitive Gothic novel.

  Maturin and his wife Henrietta bought a large house at 37 York Street just off Stephen’s Green with the intention of turning it into a school. The venture was not a success however and they were forced to abandon the project due to their inability to attract a sufficient number of pupils to the school.

  Maturin was known to have many unusual habits. One of his York Street neighbours was the poet James Clarence Mangan, who commented on Maturin’s peculiar dress sense. Mangan once described seeing Maturin strolling through York Street dressed in an ‘extraordinary double-belted and treble-caped rug’ with a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other. On other occasions he was to be seen walking through the city wearing a dressing gown and slippers.

  While working on his novels, Maturin stuck a red wafer to his forehead as a warning to family and friends that he was not to be disturbed, and he was also known to seal his lips shut with a sticky paste made from flour and water so that he wouldn’t be tempted to talk to anyone while he was working.

  Maturin loved dancing to such an extent that he even organised morning dancing parties for his friends at his home in York Street. On these occasions he drew all the curtains in the house and lit candles to give an impression of night-time.

  Charles Maturin died on 30 October 1824 at the age of fo
rty-two following a short illness. He had suffered periodic bouts of ill health during his last years and it has been said that he died following an accidental drug overdose at his home on York Street.

  Newgate Prison

  There were two Newgate prisons in Dublin. The original Newgate stood near Cornmarket and Bridge Street, and prior to its use as a prison it had been a watchtower over one of the gates of the old city walls and had been in use since 1285.

  The building fell into major disrepair and underwent many renovations during the seventeenth century and in 1773 it was decided to build a new prison across the river at Green Street. Construction was painstakingly slow and the new prison wasn’t completed until 1780.

  Up until the erection of the new prison, most public hangings in the city had taken place at St Stephen’s Green. This necessitated a short cart ride for the condemned man or woman from the old Newgate prison to the gallows on the Green. These processions usually attracted thousands of people and often led to serious civil disorder. With the move to the new prison, it became much easier and safer for the authorities to conduct executions as it meant that they could then hang prisoners within the gaol itself.

  The first public hanging to take place at the new Newgate was that of Patrick Lynch, who had been convicted of armed robbery in January 1783. Thousands turned out to view the spectacle and many of the city’s streets were blocked for the whole day. Lynch appeared on the balcony at noon and a rope was tied around his neck. The other end of the rope was attached to a new hanging mechanism that was given the following description by the Dublin Evening Post : ‘a tremendous apparatus for the execution of criminals is fixed at the front of the New Gaol in the Little Green. It consists of a strong iron gibbet with four pulleys of the same metal, underneath which is a hanging scaffold on which the fated wretches are to come out from the centre window, and on a signal the supporters of the scaffold are drawn from under it and the criminals remain suspended.’

  Lynch’s body was left dangling from the noose for four hours after the execution and his body was then given over to surgeons for dissection.

  Newgate was only used as a prison until 1839 but during its sixty-year history there were a high number of escapes and an even greater number of attempted escapes, many of which were undertaken by women prisoners.

  Commenting on an attempted mass break-out from New-gate gaol by the women prisoners in September 1787, Walker’s Hibernian Magazine asserted that ‘so astonishing an exertion was never made by a set of females in any gaol in Europe’.

  The women had managed to dig a tunnel through the solid foundations of the new prison until it reached a spot on the road outside, directly under a vegetable stall. The tunnel was close to completion when one of their number reported the scheme to the prison authorities, who promptly took action against the would-be escapees.

  The building of the tunnel was a remarkable feat and it was said to have been done without the use of tools except for an old poker and a lot of patience. The stones and debris from the tunnel were taken out piece-by-piece and dumped in a large sewerage pit in the prison and the authorities didn’t suspect a thing until they were tipped off by the informer. The Hibernian Journal , described the women as ‘petticoat miners’ while the Freeman’s Journal humorously suggested at the time that King George sent the women ‘miners’ to help his cousin who was at that time attempting to break through a blockade around the Dutch city of Utrecht.

  Almanacs

  P.J. McCall (1861–1919), the Dublin newspaper columnist, publican and author of In The Shadow of St Patrick’s, also spent many years collecting information related to the history of Dublin and Irish almanacs and trade directories.

  McCall had originally intended to publish this work in pamphlet form, but for some reason he never quite managed to get round to it. However, the manuscript of McCall’s work is still held in the National Library of Ireland and much of the information contained in it was published in 1897 by McCall’s friend Edward Evans in a publication entitled A Historical and Bibliographical Account of Almanacks, Directories, Etc., Published in Ireland From The Sixteenth Century.

  The best known of all the Dublin almanac producers and astrologists was undoubtedly the former cobbler and self-appointed doctor of astrology, fortune-teller and weather forecaster, John Whalley (1653–1724).

  One of Whalley’s chief rivals in the Dublin almanac industry was Andrew Cumpsty, compiler of the Dublin Almanack in 1694 and A New Almanack in 1714, printed by Sarah Sadleir in Schoolhouse Lane near High Street.

  The New Almanack was typical of the almanacs of the day and it contained information such as the high and low tides, position of the moon, fair-days, holy days, swearing days, lists of aldermen, king lists, court-sittings and a complete weather forecast for the entire year.

  Disappointingly, Cumpsty declined to make any astrological predictions for that year, presumably on account of the flak that he had received for some of his predictions in preceding years. One disaster that Cumpsty had not foreseen was his own impending death, which took place on 23 November 1713 just as he had applied the finishing touches to what proved to be his last almanac.

  Another Dublin quack astrologist named John Coats, author of the Vox Stellarum, published in 1714, didn’t have any such inhibitions however and he confidently predicted ‘great uneasiness’ to the king of France in January, ‘various sorts of evil effects both on man and beast, and those too of the highest rank as well as those of inferior stations as well as all sorts of fevers, agues and famine in May’. Coats also predicted ‘nothing but wars and fighting’ for June and July, and nothing but ‘craziness, diseases, murder, rapine and general evil for the rest of the year’.

  Another Dublin almanac compiler of renown was John Knapp, who first produced Knapp’s almanac in 1718. Knapp, a Cork watch and clock mender, was the first Irish astrologer to introduce mathematical tables to Irish almanacs and had an office at the Sign of the Dyal Tavern in Meath Street.

  Cumpsty, Coats and Knapp – apart from the fact that they were all astrologers – had one other thing in common: they were all detested by John Whalley and none was spared from the sharpness of his tongue.

  Cumpsty often bore the brunt of Whalley’s hostility, who once referred to him as a ‘Mathe-Maggoty Monster’ and a ‘Sheep’s-faced antagonist’ and he also made derisive comments about Coats, whom he referred to as ‘the false prophet’ and having ‘more years than manners’.

  Other well-known Dublin almanacs during the eighteenth century were: The Starry Interpreter, Tom Tatler’s Almanack and The Cuckold’s New Almanack, published in 1721. These were jointly known as Swift’s Almanacks and were allegedly printed by Jonathan Swift.

  As time wore on the public became increasingly incredulous at these astrologers’ rantings and soon all astrological predictions were quietly dropped from the almanacs. However all other features were kept in publications such as The Gentleman and Citizen’s Almanack, The Treble Almanack and Hoey’s Complete Pocket Companion and of course the most famous of all almanacs the Irish Merlin, better known today as Old Moore’s Almanac.

  Usshers

  The Ussher family has had a long-standing connection with Ireland and with Dublin in particular. The evidence of the family’s importance to the city can still be seen in some of our existing street and place names such as Ussher’s Island and Ussher’s Quay and others that have long since disappeared, such as Ussher’s Garden, Ussher’s Gate, Ussher’s Ground and Ussher’s Pill.

  Ussher’s Island takes its name from John Ussher who leased it from the corporation in 1557. The island was said to contain four acres and it was surrounded by the Liffey to the north, two branches of the River Camac to the south and west, and by a pool that came to be known as Ussher’s Pill to the east of the Island. The development of Ussher’s Quay began at the end of the eighteenth century when the Ussher family decided to build a row of houses on the island.

  The Usshers, according to Edward McLysaght’s Irish
Families, were originally a Norman family called Nevill who arrived in Ireland with King John in the early thirteenth century. McLysaght states that one of this family ‘took the surname Ussher from the official position he held under that king’. The name itself has its origins in an old French word uissier and the Latin osliarius , which, roughly translated, means ‘doorman’ or an official meeter and greeter who keeps out undesirables.

  There were several Usshers in Dublin from an early period and one of these was John le Ussher who was constable of Dublin Castle in 1302.

  Arland Ussher was mayor of Dublin in 1467. His son Christopher, also served the city in that capacity in 1516 and he held the title of ‘Customer and Collector of Dublin’ an honour conferred on him by Henry VIII. Christopher’s son John was also mayor of Dublin in 1561 and he was described by a contemporary as ‘a zealous man in Christ’s religion, an honest man of life, and well reported of them that have to do with him’.

  Ten years later, John Ussher sponsored the publication of one of the first books written in the Irish language in modern times. The book, published in 1571, was a copy of the Protestant catechism translated into Irish by Sean O’Kearney. Part of the introduction to the book reads: ‘Printed in Irish in Atha Cliath (Dublin) at the expense of John Ussher, Alderman, at the head of the Bridge on 20 June 1571.’