A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  It was far from the end of the matter. By April 1917 Belton was reported to be addressing Sinn Féin meetings in his native Co. Longford during the by-election that saw a rebel prisoner, Joe McGuinness, elected to the House of Commons. Belton was reported to have boasted that he had taken part in the rising. Confronted with the allegation, he admitted speaking at the meeting but claimed he spoke only on the division of a neighbour’s farm in which he had an interest.

  It took until September for him to receive a formal warning to be more circumspect in his public activities. The saga would continue. For the moment, security agents of the state, such as Major Price, could only fulminate that ‘it is not healthy for Govt. officials to identify themselves with such things.’38

  Drift seemed the order of the day. A good example was the electricity supply situation in the city. In August 1915 the corporation established a sub-committee to see if savings could be made, given the high price of coal and difficulties in obtaining supplies from Britain. A consultant engineer, Patrick Walter D’Alton, a retired British army lieutenant-colonel, was commissioned to undertake the task. He completed his report by the following February and put down much of the delay to difficulties in obtaining wattmeter certificates from the Electricity Supply Department. When he did receive them he found a deviation of 511,000 units between the records of the Pigeon House power station and the official returns to the corporation. He described some of the measuring equipment readings as ‘worthless and misleading.’ He also warned that the anticipated winter load for 1916/17 would require ‘all your generating sets to be placed in a condition of perfect order during the spring and early summer of 1916,’ and required the acquisition of a new turbo alternator if resources permitted. Among the changes he advocated were

  (1) a reduction in administrative overheads: the present system was ‘unduly complicated as a result of … dual control by an Engineer who is not a manager and a Secretary who is part manager’; he suggested devolving more managerial functions on the engineer;

  (2) reducing the load factor on the overworked and partly outdated equipment;

  (3) reducing charges to private customers;

  (4) reducing the number of manual and clerical workers but not the professional engineering staff;

  (5) transferring members of the outdoor staff, such as canvassers for new business and meter-readers, to the Secretarial Department;

  (6) ending the monopoly of the Scottish coal supplier and ensuring greater consistency in the quality of fuel (the calorific value of the coal varied from 10,500 to 12,5000 BTU per ton, which was bad for the boilers as well as poor value for money);

  (7) investing more capital in generation plant and expanding the generation and distribution system in the coming year;

  (8) cleaning, overhauling, repairing and recalibrating equipment more regularly;

  (9) using ‘obsolete’ Stewart engines only in emergencies, as they made ‘extravagant use of fuel.’

  Even the ‘excellent’ Oerlikon turbines ‘need to be kept under close observation,’ D’Alton warned.

  The problem with his report, like that of the Local Government Board on the housing crisis in 1914, was that it was so universal in its condemnation of the system that it united the entire municipal establishment against him. When Dublin’s electrical engineer, Mark Ruddle, was asked to respond, he rejected practically all D’Alton’s criticisms out of hand. They took no account of the ‘special difficulties’ under which Dublin laboured, such as distance from coal supplies and a smaller population than comparators cited, such as the London power stations. While Ruddle attributed the high cost of private consumption to the cost of fuel compared with Britain, his own figures showed that householders were subsidising business on a large scale. In the year ending March 1915 private consumers used 53 per cent of all power but contributed 78 per cent of income (£72,300).

  Ruddle firmly rejected claims of overstaffing. The wage figure of £12,000 cited by D’Alton included £5,212 spent on capital works and £1,174 for work carried out by the staff of the Electricity Supply Committee on behalf of other sections of the corporation. Ruddle could also point to high interest rates as a justification for not being able to invest in new equipment. In a general defence of the existing regime he gave a potted history of the city’s electricity grid, pointing out that its capacity had increased from the equivalent of 1,000 lamps in 1891 to 600,000. Capital invested had risen from an initial £37,000 to £857,000, and income from £5,600 to over £100,000. The cost of generation and distribution had fallen from 2.43d per unit in 1904 to 1.27d in 1915 and, despite the increases in coal bills caused by the war, had been contained at 1.4d in 1916. These improvements were reflected in the financial performance of the committee. A deficit of £12,500 in 1914 had been converted into a surplus of £11,670 in 1915, and the electricity enterprise was still in surplus by £8,840 in 1916.

  Ruddle had been with the enterprise from the start and had been appointed city electrical engineer in 1904. He was there long enough to accumulate many allies, including Fred Allan, secretary of the corporation, and Laurence Kettle, city treasurer, who was responsible for the administration of the electricity scheme that D’Alton found so little favour with.

  Although the corporation had itself commissioned D’Alton to investigate the electricity generation and distribution system, members could not agree on how to proceed. Suggestions that D’Alton might take over were quickly dismissed. On several occasions a motion was proposed ‘to achieve the results which Mr D’Alton has outlined in his report’ by giving Ruddle ‘entire charge’ of the commercial side of the business as well as the engineering section for a trial period of two years. The former Lord Mayor Lorcan Sherlock objected, on the grounds that there was little point in asking Ruddle to implement D’Alton’s proposals when he had characterised them in his own report as ‘ignorant views, unfounded opinions, stupid suggestions and impossible of realisation.’ A compromise proposal that Ruddle be appointed general manager, that Laurence Kettle replace him as chief electrical engineer and that Fred Allan be appointed commercial manager made even less sense. In the end little was done until Kettle succeeded Ruddle in April 1919, when the latter retired because of ill-health.39

  The controversy certainly took its toll on Ruddle. At a meeting of the Electricity Supply Committee in September 1917 he was accused of manipulating overtime and other payments to favour fellow-members of his ‘lodge’. Ruddle felt compelled to state publicly that he was ‘not a member of any lodge, whether Masonic, Orange, Hibernian, or Sinn Fein.’ The allegations probably said more about municipal politics than about Ruddle’s affiliation, which appears to have been Redmondite, like most senior officials. He added to his statement the intriguing postscript that he had ‘never been threatened by any members of his staff, either in or out of his office.’40

  One of his last public acts was to contribute a guinea (£1 1s) to the subscription list for building a memorial to Tom Kettle and his father, Andrew, a veteran Land Leaguer, who had died within a few weeks of each other in 1916. The Laurence Kettle who replaced Ruddle was another son of Andrew Kettle. Ruddle did not enjoy his retirement for long, dying four months later.

  Chapter 9

  ‘THE BABY WAS THEN NINE OR TEN DAYS OLD, AND THE GIRL SAID THAT SHE WOULD DROWN IT’

  The first formal sign that the traditional dominance of the United Irish League in Dublin civic politics was coming to an end was the election of the maverick nationalist councillor Laurence O’Neill, unopposed, as Lord Mayor on 24 January 1917. The establishment nationalist figure, Sir Patrick Shortall, freshly knighted for his services to the war effort, withdrew his nomination. O’Neill had been among those arrested briefly as a suspected rebel after the rising. In his election speech he compared his fate a few months previously as a prisoner ‘marched between a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets’ with his elevation to first citizen of Dublin. It was the template for many more illustrious political careers to come.

&n
bsp; While O’Neill attributed his past relative obscurity to the fact that he ‘took a little interest in the uplifting of the poor class of worker in the city,’ he was in fact an auctioneer, property-owner and even slum landlord in a small way. His proposer, Alderman Patrick Corrigan, was an undertaker and a slum landlord in a large way; his seconder, Councillor McAvin, was a bakery-owner. Meanwhile O’Neill’s predecessor, Sir James Gallagher, the saviour of Grafton Street, was lucky to scrape the traditional vote of thanks by 24 votes to 19 after being denounced as the ‘embodiment of British rule in Ireland’ by Alderman Tom Kelly.1

  The shifting sentiment had less impact when it came to hard shillings-and-pence issues, as the bitter battle over the widening of North Earl Street showed. The damage caused during the rising provided an opportunity to widen the thoroughfare, but this was fiercely resisted by owners who would lose frontage as a result. Sir Joseph Downes, ‘Lord Barmbrack’, was the largest landlord affected, and he used his position as a councillor to fight the British government for every square inch as fiercely as any Prussian. He argued, with some legitimacy, that the best shopping streets in Dublin were narrow ones, such as Henry Street, Grafton Street and, of course, North Earl Street. He had some initial success lobbying his fellow-members, and threatened to sue for £50,000 compensation if the authorities tried to widen the street by more than three feet, even though he was being offered compensatory space at the rear. Eventually a compulsory purchase order was used and the street was widened by 14 feet, rather than the 30 feet envisaged in the original proposal. Sir Joseph Downes and his neighbour, the vintner Philip Meagher, received £33,150 between them, or half the £66,000 paid out in the first tranche of payments to landlords.2

  It is no wonder that small traders, such as Repetto Byrne, could complain at a meeting of the Property Owners’ Association in August that ‘the big dogs have all been very well paid but nobody seems to care about the poorer owners.’ Their anger was all the more understandable given that in many cases they had lost not only their business but their home.

  One ‘big dog,’ T. Stafford O’Farrell, went so far as to propose that ratepayers would be better served if the government bypassed small leaseholders and bought the damaged sites outright from the owners at pre-rebellion values. Many of these small leaseholders were under-insured, or not insured at all, as well as homeless, making them totally dependent on compensation from the government and the corporation. Some were paying interest on loans to tide them over, which they wanted factored in to the compensation. However, the British government was reluctant to consider any claims for losses other than those directly linked to military activity. Even looting and fire damage were omitted from the terms of reference.

  Issues such as bank interest charges and notional lost business were a slippery slope, as claims from the railway companies showed. The Midland Great Western Railway had suffered damage amounting to less than £700 but claimed £20,000 in lost income. The Dublin and South-Eastern Railway was by far the hardest hit, as the rebels had occupied all three of its termini: Wexford, Harcourt Street and Westland Row. It suffered damage amounting to £2,000 as a consequence, particularly through the occupation and desultory fighting around Westland Row, which was out of action from 24 April until 3 May. The company also claimed £14,000 in lost income. The Great Southern and Western Railway suffered relatively little damage directly attributable to the rising but claimed £21,000 in lost income.3

  It was not until December 1917 that the claims were settled. The MGWR received £10,525, the GSWR £8,543 and the DSER £11,937.4 By then the British government had taken over control of Ireland’s railway network. Ironically, this move, which was to pre-empt the threatened strike in December 1916, had been welcomed by the Irish stock market, which feared that the companies would be sunk by inadequate compensation for the losses incurred during the rising.5

  The churches, which were among the largest landowners in the city, came out of the rising almost unscathed. The only religious building destroyed was the Presbyterian church in Lower Abbey Street. The General Assembly received £1,150 in compensation and a rebuilding grant of £8,700, plus £2,000 for other property damaged in the city.6

  One enterprise that did exceptionally well out of the compensation scheme was the Freeman’s Journal, mouthpiece of the Irish Party. It claimed £74,000, although it was insured for only £32,000. In contrast to its treatment of other claimants, the Defence of the Realm Property Losses Committee made an award of £60,000. The rival Irish Independent complained that much of the stock on which the Freeman’s Journal received compensation, including Linotype machines, vans and horses, was obsolete or had not been lost at all. In fact the paper’s premises were badly damaged, and all the Linotype machines destroyed. Whether it was obsolete or not, such equipment was extremely expensive to replace. The paper’s ledgers were also destroyed. By June 1917 a modest £800 in funds before the rising had been transformed into a £20,000 overdraft.

  Despite the generosity of the exchequer, the Freeman’s Journal would never again pose a serious threat to the Murphy empire. It passed under new ownership in 1919 and adopted a militant nationalist stance more in keeping with public opinion. Eventually the title was acquired by the Independent group, and it ceased publication in 1924.7

  The families of civilians killed in the fighting did not fare nearly so well as big business. There were only 450 claims, as opposed to more than 820 from property-owners. There were a little more than sixty awards, and the Dublin Victims Committee was initially restricted to considering cases where the main breadwinner in a household, usually the father, had been killed or seriously injured.

  The rates of payment were based on the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906), which covered death and injury at work. Like the act, the scheme applied to those earning no more than £250 a year. There were a handful of cases where claims were based on earnings over this amount, but almost all failed. The largest claim was for £5,216 13s 4d, made by Mrs John Murphy of Delgany, who claimed that her husband earned £360 a year. Unfortunately, all his financial records perished with him in the fire that consumed his offices in the city centre. The committee rejected his widow’s claim in the absence of proof of earnings.8

  The committee did try to apply some flexibility and compassion, but it was confounded by the Irish Treasury and its Remembrancer, Maurice Headlam. He in turn was backed by the new Assistant Under-Secretary, John Taylor.9 Both men acted as if public funds were their own, except when pressing their own claims. Taylor, in particular, felt that his services were grossly undervalued.10

  The secretary of the committee, Hugh Love, did succeed in persuading the Treasury to widen its terms of reference so that some payment might be made to parents for the loss of a child, or to a husband for the loss of a wife.

  The loss of a wife represents a considerable pecuniary loss, in view of the fact that the wife acted as an unpaid housekeeper; and where there are young children this loss is increased seeing that some other guardian for them must be provided.

  Love’s argument prevailed more in principle than in practice. For instance, in four cases where the committee awarded £25 to parents for the death of children aged between three and fourteen the Treasury reduced the amount involved to £10. In four cases where awards of £50 were made to husbands who had lost a wife who was not a breadwinner the Treasury similarly reduced the awards to £10 each. However, it made no reductions in five other cases where parents were awarded £50 each for the loss of children ‘who were earning.’

  In truth, the sheer variety and complexity of cases would have tried the most compassionate of committees. A case in point is that of Kate Golding, a widow in Longford Street, who claimed first for herself and three children. When visited by the DMP she produced two children and said the third was at the shops. When questioned about the fact that the children appeared to be too old to be hers, she said they were from her late husband’s first marriage. Detective-Officer Thomas Mannion concluded that Mrs Goldi
ng was unreliable, and ‘fond of drink.’ Having established that there were no children from the dead man’s first marriage, and that the youngest child, Kate Golding Junior, was not the natural daughter of Mrs Golding or her late husband, the detective reported:

  She admitted that … it was an adopted child. She then said, ‘I was living at 132 Townsend Street in April 1913, and saw the child with a girl, whom I do not know and never saw since. The baby was then nine or ten days old, and the girl said that she would drown it. She slept on my landing outside my door for two nights with the baby. I took the baby from her and brought it to City Quay Roman Catholic Church and had it baptised by Fr Gaynor there. He charged me one shilling and said that I would have a great reward for keeping it. The child was christened Kate Golding, my own name. I kept it since. That happened on April 4th, 1914.’

  However, the detective could find no reference to a Kate Golding in the baptismal record, and when he enquired of Father Gaynor the priest had no recollection of the incident. The detective concluded that the woman was claiming for more children in the hope of a bigger award, unaware that the amount would be based on her husband’s earnings rather than on the number of dependants he left.

  In fact the situation was even more complex, and it was not until Detective-Officer Mannion reported again on 13 June 1917 that the real mother of Kate Golding Junior was revealed. She was a Kate Clinton, whose husband had been imprisoned for neglect. Mrs Clinton took up with Patrick O’Neill, a waiter in the Friendly Brothers’ Club, St Stephen’s Green, who was the father of the child. He was now serving in France. On 26 October 1917 the Treasury concluded:

  If she [Mrs Golding] had declared truthfully that there were no children by either marriage she would have been entitled to the full amount of the award instead of having to take only a share if there were children. Her false declaration has consequently reacted on herself by the diminution, as proposed of her share of the award from £234 to £94 and in our opinion this is a sufficient punishment for her conduct in the matter. As regards the child of whom a soldier serving in France is the reputed father and a Mrs. Clinton the mother, it was adopted as stated when ten days old by Mrs. Golding with the knowledge and consent of the deceased and continues to live with her. The Chief Secretary who has the papers before him agreed to the proposal that the balance of the award should be lodged in Court for the benefit of the child.11