The duke gave Flood fifty pounds for winning the match and advised him to leave the country – but he decided to stay in Dublin and try to resurrect his career as a tailor. However, he was unable to shake off the stigma of his criminal past and no one would employ him. Flood eventually changed his name to Waters and moved to London, where he found employment as a scorekeeper at the Tottenham Court Road rackets court.
The duke of Richmond left Dublin in 1813 and he died from rabies in 1819 after being bitten by his pet fox.
Father Fay
The name of eighteenth-century Dublin priest Father Patrick Fay is not one that you’re likely to find mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopaedia and it’s a safe bet that he’ll never get on a short-list for canonisation.
‘Father’ Fay was originally a Roman Catholic priest in Dublin during the 1780s but this colourful clergyman was better known in the city for his extra-curricular activities such as common assault, forgery and wrestling. Fay was also a successful property speculator and he also ran a lucrative practice as a ‘couple-beggar’.
A couple-beggar can be best described as an unscrupulous priest who would marry anyone, regardless of age or station, and the only criterion was that they paid the priest’s exorbitant marriage fee. Fay was known to charge couples a guinea for the privilege and was said to marry up to six couples a day.
Fay publicly renounced his faith and joined the Church of Ireland and bought himself the chaplaincy of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham. He didn’t last too long in this position, however, as he was dismissed for inappropriate behaviour.
It was after his dismissal from his post at Kilmainham that Fay first hit on the idea of becoming a couple-beggar and he soon developed a thriving practice from one of his many Dublin homes.
Following several years of litigation in the Dublin courts, the archbishop of Dublin managed to get all of these marriages annulled. However, this didn’t bother Father Fay in the slightest and he carried on regardless.
Father Fay was also known to be quick with his fists and was adept at wrestling. In 1786 Fay was brought before a Dublin court on 27 October where he was indicted on a charge of ‘assaulting and cutting in a most dangerous manner’ one Bridget Duffy at Drumcondra in August of that year. He was initially sentenced to six months in Newgate but managed to stay out of jail by paying off his victim.
In April of the following year the Freeman’s Journal reported on a wrestling match between Fay and a sedan-chair carrier which was held in a field near Phibsborough. In the fight, which was witnessed by a large crowd Fay eventually defeated the ‘chairman’, winning a gallon of whiskey for his troubles.
In September 1788, Patrick Fay, who was by that time being described as a widower and father of five children, was accused and found guilty of forgery and sentenced to be hanged at Newgate prison on 8 November of that year. The Reverend Fay was indicted on four counts of forgery and with intent to defraud two Harristown farmers, Patrick Fulham and his brother John, and the high sheriff of County Meath.
At the time that the sentence was passed, Fay was given no chance of a reprieve and Walkers Hibernian Magazine of September in 1788 reported: ‘His being known to be a man of affluence, and under no pressure of necessity, to cause his having recourse to such a criminal expedient, weighs chiefly against him as he is supposed to be the proprietor of at least a dozen houses in Dublin.’
Despite the paper’s pessimism, Fay did manage to have his sentence commuted to transportation and on 13 June 1789 he was taken from Kilmainham prison and put on board the Duke of Leinster which was bound for Nova Scotia.
However, Fay never reached his destination and it subsequently emerged that he had paid the ship’s captain to allow him to escape on board a fishing vessel while they were still close to the Irish coast. He subsequently settled in the French city of Bordeaux where newspaper reports say he became a successful cheesemonger.
Constable Sheahan
At three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 6 May 1905, a fitter working on the Dublin main drainage scheme, John Fleming, climbed down into a sewer at the junction of Burgh Quay and Hawkins Street in order to fix a broken pipe.
He had hardly reached the bottom of the ladder when noxious fumes rising from the sewer overcame him. Two of his workmates who tried to go to his assistance were also struck down by the deadly gases.
A young newspaper boy named Christopher Nolan, who witnessed the incident, ran to get help. The first person he came across was twenty-eight-year-old DMP constable Patrick Sheahan, who was on duty at the nearby O’Connell Bridge.
Sheahan, described as being of ‘Herculean proportions’, had been in tight situations before. Three years earlier he had rescued an elderly couple from a falling tenement in Townsend Street and he once single-handedly recaptured an escaped bull in Grafton Street.
Sheahan rushed to the scene of the accident and climbed down into the manhole, where he managed to get Fleming and his workmate John Coleman back to the surface. However, Fleming, a resident of Gordon Street in Ringsend and father of nine children, never regained consciousness and died soon after arriving at Mercer’s Hospital. Sheahan himself fell victim to the poisonous vapours shortly afterwards and perished at the bottom of the sewer.
A large number of spectators had gathered at the scene and the Dublin Evening Mail described the crowd as ‘hooligans of the worst possible type, utterly indifferent to all considerations save their own contemptible amusement, and to them anything in the shape of interference with the police was enjoyable’.
However, the Mail journalist seems to have gotten his story badly wrong on this occasion as it subsequently emerged that many of these so-called ‘hooligans’ had recklessly risked their own lives in an attempt to rescue the men trapped in the drain.
Time and time again, firemen and members of the public descended into the sewer in a vain attempt to rescue Sheahan, but many were overcome by the gases and had to be rescued themselves. Apart from the two dead men, nine rescuers were eventually hauled from the sewer in an unconscious state.
The heroism demonstrated by Sheahan and the other rescuers had a deep impact on the city, and thousands of Dubliners came out to pay their respects when Sheahan’s remains were taken from Mercer’s Hospital to lie overnight at Mount Argus before being transported to his native Limerick for burial.
At an inquest into the tragedy a few days later, the Dublin City coroner was fulsome in his praise of the crowd and he particularly singled out Irishtown hackney-cab driver Kieran Fitzpatrick and fireman Martin Lambert for their heroism. Fitzpatrick and Lambert were awarded gallantry medals later on for their actions on that day. In all, thirty members of the public and two firemen were presented with medals for their heroism.
The lord mayor of Dublin made a public appeal for funds to build a suitable memorial on the spot to Constable Sheahan and the others who took part in the rescue; and the monument designed by a Mr P. O’Neill, which now commemorates their deeds on the corner of Burgh Quay and Hawkins Street, was erected in 1906 by the Mansion House Committee.
Frank De Groot
Official records show that the opening of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge took place on 19 March 1932 when the Premier of New South Wales, J.T. Lang, performed the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Unofficially however – and much to the embarrassment of the Australian authorities – the bridge received an unscheduled opening moments earlier when Dublin fascist, Captain Frank De Groot, dressed in an Australian army uniform and mounted on a horse, charged forward and slashed the ribbon with his sword declaring the bridge open ‘in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales’.
Captain De Groot had managed to avoid detection by riding on to the bridge along with the official Governors’ mounted escort and he wasn’t apprehended until after he had declared the bridge officially open.
De Groot was dragged from his horse after the incident, arrested and charged with insanity, insulting behaviour and threatening a police inspector. He
was examined by a ‘mental specialist’ who declared that he could find nothing wrong with the captain.
Frank De Groot was born at Lakesfield, Strand Road in Merrion in 1890 and was a member of a well-known Dublin Huguenot family. He was educated at Blackrock College and emigrated to Australia soon after finishing his studies and became an antiques and fine arts dealer.
He returned to Dublin soon after the outbreak of the First World War where he enlisted as an officer in the British Army. He served with the 15 th Hussars in France during the war and afterwards returned to Australia. There he resumed his former occupation as an art dealer and also became a commander in the fascist and anti-communist New Guard movement in New South Wales.
Following the bridge incident, one English newspaper alleged that De Groot had served with the Black and Tans in Ireland during the War of Independence, but his family strenuously denied this.
De Groot appeared before Sydney’s Lunacy Court on a charge of being insane but the case was dismissed. However, the Dubliner was rearrested and charged with malicious damage to the ribbon, which was valued at two pounds.
De Groot was brought before the police court at Liverpool Street in Sydney on 1 April 1932 and his trial attracted a crowd of over 3,000, which included members of the New Guard and a great number of communists. Two hundred policemen marshalled the crowd and ten arrests were made.
De Groot was remanded on the ribbon-slashing charge but was given bail when the commander-in-chief of the New Guard put up bail for his release. The Australian public greeted the incident with some hilarity and a ‘De Groot shilling fund’ was established in his honour. Within two days, the fund had reached 2,500 shillings.
The fund was established by a Sydney solicitor who compared De Groot’s actions to the Boston Tea Party, which triggered the American War of Independence.
De Groot was later charged with assaulting the police and his trial began on 4 April. De Groot said that he had decided to cut the ribbon himself because, in his opinion, ‘he was much better suited to open the bridge than Mr Lang because of his [De Groot’s] superior war service’.
De Groot was convicted on the insulting behaviour charge and was fined the maximum fine of five pounds. He later sued the police and the chief secretary of New South Wales for £5,000 in damages and the claim was eventually settled out of court.
Frank De Groot eventually returned to Ireland and he died here in 1969.
Howth Disaster
On 15 February 1853, the Queen Victoria steamship belonging to the City of Dublin Steam-packet Company, ran aground near the Bailey Lighthouse in Howth, resulting in the sinking of the ship and the loss of seventy passengers and crew. The Queen Victoria struck rocks near the Bailey during a blizzard and went down about fifteen minutes later.
The Queen Victoria had set out on its short voyage from Liverpool to Dublin on the afternoon of Monday 14 February with a mixed cargo and approximately 120 people on board under the command of Captain Church, a skipper of many years experience.
All went well until the ship ran into a heavy snowstorm in the Irish Sea. Despite the blizzard, however, the Queen Victoria managed to make steady progress and by 2 a.m. it had passed the Kish Lighthouse. Soon the Bailey Lighthouse came into view momentarily but at that stage the snow became so dense that it was completely blocked from view.
With visibility down to zero, the ship’s lookout didn’t see the rugged cliffs of Howth until they were fifty yards away and, despite a desperate attempt to stop the ship, it smashed headlong onto the jagged rocks at a spot called the Broken Hatchets.
Captain Church gave orders to reverse the ship’s engines and he succeeded in steering the steamer away from the rocks into deeper water, but the ship had been badly holed beneath the waterline and began to sink rapidly.
Many of the ship’s passengers, who had been asleep below deck, rushed towards the ship’s lifeboats. One lifeboat wasn’t secured properly and fell straight into the freezing waters, killing all of its occupants instantly.
Another lifeboat with seventeen people aboard was successfully launched, but it was found to be leaking rapidly until a young boy, showing great presence of mind, thrust his hand into the plughole and plugged the leak.
Despite the captain’s efforts to calm them, many men, women and children left on board the stricken ship panicked and leapt into the sea and were drowned instantly. The Queen Victoria went down shortly afterwards and Captain Church, in true seafaring tradition, went down with his craft.
However, the masts of the ship were still visible above the waterline and at least a dozen survivors clung desperately to the foremast and mainmast. The lifeboat manned by the boy with his hand in the plughole and other crew members bravely returned to the ship and rescued five survivors off the topmast and were about to attempt the rescue of the others when the steamer Roscommon arrived on the scene and took off the remaining survivors.
In all, fifty-eight persons managed to survive the disaster, including twenty members of the crew. Those rescued by the Roscommon were safely landed the next day at Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) while those rescued by the heroic lifeboat men were landed at Howth. In addition to these were ten or twelve of the passengers and crew who had managed to jump onto the rocks when the ship first struck and were helped to safety by the keeper of the Bailey Lighthouse.
An inquiry into the disaster later concluded that the Victoria was lost through the negligence of Captain Church ‘in not sounding, stopping the engines, or taking proper precautions when the snow-shower came on’ and the conduct of the first mate was also sited as a major cause of the disaster. The head of the inquiry, Captain W.H. Walker, also observed that the accident might have been avoided if the Bailey Lighthouse had been properly manned and fitted with a fog-bell. Captain Walker also commended the young seaman Patrick D’Arcy for his quick thinking in plugging the hole in the lifeboat with his hand.
Hidden Dublin Page 19