The painting is now part of the National Gallery of Ireland’s Yeats collection and is listed in their catalogue as:
‘Horse in Moonlight, unknown date. Purchased from the Portobello College of Business (1987). Oil on canvas, 35 x 45 cm, NGI 24027-7.’To my knowledge the painting has never been put on public display.
Portobello Houses current incarnation is that of a business college, and since the institute opened in 1988, immediately following the aforementioned renovation, there have been no further reports of ‘artistic disturbances’ much to the delight, I am sure, of the school’s board of directors.
And despite two centuries of history, Portobello House still stoically overlooks the canal and beyond its southern banks to Rathmines.
Favourite No. 7 Omnibus
An oil painting by the English artist David Snagg shows Portobello House as it stood in the halcyon days of 1809, two years after it opened as a hotel. It depicts gentlemen with walking sticks and ladies with parasols strolling on the lawn near the lock; a canal-boat approaches in the distance. This splendid painting now hangs on the first floor of the period Georgian museum at 29 Fitzwilliam Street and is available for public viewing without prior appointment. If you should see this painting first hand, you will notice that the horizon line bends, rather unusually, to give the viewer an impossible stereoscopic perspective that does not in actuality exist. Jutting into view at the far left side of Snaggs canvas is a bridge spanning the water at the Grand Canals sixth lock. This bridge is known locally as the Portobello Bridge; but local tradition, in this case, is not exactly accurate. The bridge's real name is revealed on two overlooked plaques affixed to its north-west and south-east sides. They read:
La Touche Bridge, 179110
La Touche Bridge was named after David Digges La Touche de Rompiers, a French Huguenot who served alongside William III of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. After the battle, and a short time in the crinoline trade, La Touche established a powerful, eponymous bank just across the road from Newcomen St Co. on Castle Street. The La Touche family soon became a dynasty of sorts that would affect Dublin’s economic and political climate for generations. If truth be told, David La Touche Esq., Digges La Touches grandson, was in fact the treasurer of the Grand Canal Company at the time of the bridge's dedication.
La Touche Bridge and the roads leading up to it on either side have now been redesigned into a gentle gradient beginning well before the bridge itself. Aside from periodic motor crashes, this gradual slope is of no particular note to the modern driver other than the not-insignificant vista it provides of Rathmines and, on sunny days, a rather eye-catching view of the Dublin Mountains pressed against the sky beyond. But in the mid nineteenth century La Touche Bridge was far steeper. It was a dangerous gauntlet for drivers of the old horse-drawn omnibuses, which, unlike today's buses, were run to stringent timetables.
Over the centuries the Rathmines stretch of the Grand Canal, which La Touche Bridge spans, has seen its fair share of calamities. Some say that this particular expanse of waterway is even prone to them. Since the canal opened in 1756 there have been: numerous suicides; countless drownings, one as recent as 2003; the capsizing in 1792 of a passage boat with one hundred and fifty travellers bound for County Kildare; and perhaps the single most tragic and memorable misfortune of all - an accident in 1861 involving the ill-fated Favourite No. 7 Omnibus and its six unfortunate passengers.
At about 9.20 p.m., on Saturday 6 April 1861, the Favourite No. 7 Omnibus was heading north along Rathmines Road. The bus departed from Rathgar and was due to terminate at Nelsons Pillar on Sackville Street.12 It was pulled by two large draught horses and carried eight passengers. It stopped at the top of the bridge and let two disembark. Six remained on board when the conductor, a chap by the name of Patrick Costello, signalled the all clear to the driver. Heavy rain in
Dublin is common in the springtime, and this night was no different. The steep bridge was slick with water and visibility was at a minimum. Badger, a stout grey horse, and his companion, a bay mare, had reliably pulled the No. 7 for years, but on this night something spooked the latter of the two equines, causing the harness to catch in the pole-chain. Patrick Costello disembarked to calm the horses, but did not appear to be concerned with any impending danger. According to a report in The Freemans Journal on the following Monday:
[The horses] both got restive and began to back in the direction of Rathmines. [The driver, Patrick Hardy,] turned their heads towards the east with the intention of making them go up the incline of the hill at an angle. This involved the partial locking of the four wheels ... The back part of the bus came in contact with the wooden fence between the Lock and the road. The back wheels went over the granite kerb. The horses pulled, but in vain.
A witness stated at the inquest that the bridge's wooden fence, undoubtedly rotted from years of dirty weather, ‘yielded like straw’ and the omnibus, horses and all, plunged backwards into the lock chamber. The noise of the *bus splintering against the granite sides of the lock and the terrified snorting of the horses as they fell must have been horrible. From the passengers, however, not a sound was emitted, whether because terror had deprived them of utterance, or the shock of the fall had stunned them. The horses fell between the omnibus and the bridge where they struggled for their lives, and for some time after the fall they kicked their hoofs against the wooden breakwater. The "bus came to a rest at the bottom of the lock, its door, the only means of escape, facing downwards.
You can see today that the lock is quite deep, twenty-four feet to be exact, and on the evening in question it was already half-filled with water. In the panic and confusion of the moment, O’Neill, the lock-keeper, opened the upper sluice. ‘In the name of God, O’Neill, what have you done?’ one onlooker cried out.
‘I’ll float the ’bus,’was O’Neill’s reply.
It would be an understatement to say that the result was not quite what he had hoped - the lock flooded with water, submerging all but the upended front of the ’bus. As soon as the mistake was realised, the lock-keeper scrambled to drain the chamber, but by then it was already too late.
By this time a small crowd of onlookers had assembled to watch what was already a considerable tragedy, though with the lock still draining, there was admittedly little anyone could do. Police Constable Gaffney was the first on the scene. He promptly rescued from the lock the driver, Patrick Hardy, who had miraculously leapt clear of the falling horses and escaped with only a broken arm.
The Freemans Journal continues: ‘When the water
was let off from the lock, so as to expose the top of the Bus, P.C. Gaffney and Private Smith of the 4th Light Dragoons [who arrived shortly after Gaffney] got a cleaver and hatchets and with the aid of a ladder got on to the roof of the Bus, broke a hole in the roof and took out the [six] bodies.’The first to be fished from the shattered wreck was Mrs O’Connell, scarcely alive and still clutching her infant in her arms. The baby, however, was
dead. Private Smith worked to revive Mrs O’Connell, but without success. Before she was ‘hurried off into eternity’ she was heard to mutter to Smith: ‘Where’s our driver?’ Also among the deceased were Michael Gunn, father of brothers John and Michael Gunn, who later founded the Gaiety Theatre on King Street in 1871; and the noted painter Horace W. Leech. Leech was famous for his portraits of prominent members of the Protestant ascendancy, including the famous solicitor George Bennett QjC., Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe and Sir William Wilde. As each successive victim was retrieved from the wreck and laid out on the bridge, one onlooker remarked: ‘The appearance of the bodies presented a most touching sight. All looked calm and placid, as if no struggle supervened in the calamitous moment.’
The newspaper reports were damning, particularly those in The Irish Times:. ‘Was the driver a steady and care-fill man? Where was the conductor?
He escaped, and there is no reason why he should not have helped the passengers to escape also. There are a thou
sand rumours afloat, and they who could give decisive testimony are all dead.’ The verdict given by the jury at the inquest was that every one exerted himself to the best of his judgement’ and no blame was ascribed to any party. On the coroner's report was written: Incussus in uno, incussus in omnibus, which is then further clarified in English as,‘a fatal bodily shock to the omnibus’ occupants as caused by the vehicle falling into the Lock by accident due to adverse weather conditions’.13 This, then, was determined the official cause of death, not drowning. And though everyone, including the lock-keeper, was exonerated of responsibility, those involved seemed weighed down by what we would today call survivor's guilt.
The first to die was O’Neill, the lock-keeper, who took his own life one Sunday the following year when he hound his ankles and legs up tight with sturdy twine and threw himself bodily into the very same lock he managed for thirty-five years’. The Evening Chronicle was the only newspaper to report the brief and uninteresting facts. These facts concern prolonged melancholy and moroseness, and I will not bore you with them here. Anyone with an interest in this sort of thing can read more in the Chronicle’s ‘Dublin Notes’ department.
The second to die was Patrick Costello, the conductor. By all accounts, Costello was never the same in the wake of the accident and ceased his employment with the omnibus company shortly thereafter. He became something of a recluse and that summer took up residency in the shelter of a large tree in the middle of a quiet paddock near Rathgar. The farmer tolerated him for a couple of months before complaining to the town commissioners, who promptly acted. Destitute and having no immediate family to support him, Costello became a ward of the state. For the next five years he was confined to the Richmond District Lunatics Asylum on Brunswick Street, then situated at the edge of the city. Upon his release on the first weekend of April 1866, Costello was reportedly heading west along Brunswick Street towards the countryside when he was struck dead under the wheels of a large black omnibus of unknown provenance. The only witness to the accident was the driver of a Guinness delivery wagon, who was also forced off the road by the speeding bus. 'I set the heart across me' said the drayman. ‘She [the omnibus] came out of nowhere. The poor man, he was all hunched over with his back to the road like he knew something was coming. But he didn’t see it until it was too late. I still remember that horrible look in his eye as he died there on the road, the poor man.’
For a while the Metropolitan Police sought information leading to the apprehension of the black omnibus’ driver, but with no known family to exert continued pressure on the police, the case was eventually dropped. No one was ever identified in connection with the accident.
The last to die was Patrick Hardy, the driver of the Favourite No. 7 Omnibus. Unlike the others, his death was more prolonged and painful due to tormented memories intensified by the effects of alcohol abuse, to which he wholly succumbed after the accident. Hardy lived in a small thatched cottage with his ever-tolerant wife in an area next to a bend in the Swan River known as ‘The Chains’, near modern-day Wynnefield Road. Although pardoned of any responsibility, Hardy quit his job as an omnibus driver immediately following the inquest and took up residency at Burke's public house, not more than a few yards away from his front door.
Until his death in 1892, Hardy never strayed far from the well-worn path between his cottage and the pub. And he was never seen to cross a street for the rest of his life. As he shuffled to the drinking establishment every afternoon, he always kept one eye on the road. When sober, which was not often, he displayed an edgy disposition, not to be mistaken for impoliteness, whether peering expectantly into the distance during conversation, or glancing over his perpetually hunched shoulders. But if given enough to drink he always became more genial, and since he was in a state of constant drunkenness, he was a generally well-liked character. For the price of a few pints, and if he had not yet passed out, he would treat random strangers to a version of events on the night of 6 April 1861. In 1891 that stranger was Dr R. M. Huberty of Manchester, who interviewed Hardy and recorded the anecdote for his book, An Examination of Imbibed Alcohols.
We turn now to Ireland, whose working class is known to be plagued by a largely uncontrolled compulsion to drink Mr Patrick Hardy of Rathmines is a most singular and persistent case of alcohol-induced delusions. Our meeting lasted for one hour, and in that time he drank four pints of that locally produced noxious black brew to which he is horribly addicted. His short stature and timorous nature are as such that one cannot help but to be reminded of a frightened hedgehog. His wrinkled features are beyond his years, and his hair and nails are both long and unkempt. Despite this state of dishevelment, the proprietor of the establishment knew his name and poured his drink before we even sat down, a testament to the social acceptability of the ethylated condition.
Mr Hardys severe condition stems from a tragedy he experienced some thirty years ago. By all accounts he was a normal and healthy man before the catastrophe. The event in question concerns an omnibus that fell into Dublins Grand Canal.
Mr Hardy was the driver, and the only man to go into the lock and escape with his life. The other five passengers and one infant drowned. Since the accident, Mr Hardy has shifted all feelings of guilt and personal fault to an external source. For these past thirty years he has been under the delusion that a phantasm, what he terms a monster, caused the accident. The extent of this belief is thorough and pervades his memory.
Mr Hardy tells the story in his own words: ‘Something spooked the horses that night. It was some sort of monster. I know what I seen. You don’t believe me, do you? I was doing the number seven route like I always done. Normally I bring the Inis up on the bridge and it was never a problem, even when the rains as dense as this here pint. Costello pounded me the all clear on the side of the ’bus, and just as I was about ready to go, Old Badger, he starts panicking. From the crest of the bridge I can see right down Richmond Street. I’ll never forget the sight of the monster when I first seen it. It had blinding white eyes it did, low to the ground like two burning lamps, and as it got closer they started flashing brighter at me! I could hear the thing growling as it come closer, and then it starts making these horrible trumpet screams.
You don’t believe me, do you?
I knew it was aiming to smash right into us, so I tried to get the horses to go at an angle, to move us out of the way, like, and give that screaming damned thing a wide berth. Pretty soon the old bay mare starts snorting and pulling at the pole-chain.
There was nothing I could do to stop the pair of them, but Costello got down to try. The horses started backing up, and the bus turned at an angle sharp like. Just as I hear the *bus snapping through the barrier - the monster vanishes right into thin air! I jumped out of me seat just as the T>us fell into the lock. Somehow them horses never landed on me. They always were good horses. I’ve never been able to stop thinking about that monster or all them people that went down into the lock. A ’bus needs a driver if it it ever going to get where it’s going to. There was that one young lady, prettiest face I ever seen, they pulled her out alive. She was still clutching her wee one. She knew she was dying. She looked right at me and I could see it in her eyes. O’Connell, that was her name. Pretty young lady, I’ll never forget her face. “What about our driver?” she said. “What about our driver?” Til not forget those words ever. I remember them clear as day. You don’t believe me, do you?’
Hardy passed away the same year Dr Huberty's book was published. When Hardy's body was found, he was slumped over the counter in his usual seat at the end of the bar farthest from the main road. The barman thought Hardy was dozing, as he was often prone to do. Being a regular customer he was only rousted from slumber at last call, and it was only then that the barman realised that a corpse had been sitting all night at his bar. Local legend holds that Hardy finished his pint before dying. Although years of heavy drink were certainly a factor, he is said to have died of natural causes. Naturally the wake was held at O’Gra
dy’s Pub, as Burke's was by then called, and Hardy was interred in a small plot in Mount Jerome.
Given the profound psychological impact the Favourite No. 7 tragedy had on the community, you may not be surprised to learn that it has since been woven into the fabric of local folklore. In Father Bemie Kilpatrick's landmark work, Phantoms and Apparitions of South Dublin, we learn that sightings of a ‘black carriage’ heading north along Rathmines Road is not uncommon, with the earliest recorded account dating to the mid 1890s.18 Kilpatrick believes that the black carriage is none other than the revenant of the Favourite No. 7 Omnibus, and he bases this supposition on a number of eyewitness accounts he has collected over the decades.
In 1916 a factory worker on his way home from second shift was almost run down one morning by the black carriage: ‘It disappeared right before my eyes when it reached the crest of the bridge' he recalled. A librarian working late one night in 1920 saw the black carriage from the library window; he described it rather ponderously as a nineteenth century-style omnibus silently pulled by two vaporous steeds without legs’. In 1955 a drayman saw the black carriage early one morning as he was going about his deliveries: ‘It was the queerest thing I ever seen. The carriage was black with five pale white passengers. And the two horses that were pulling it - Iswear their hooves never once touched the ground.’ Of all the accounts catalogued in Kilpatrick’s book, there is one detail that many have in common: the black carriage is always driverless.
The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories Page 3