A City in Wartime Read online

  Memories of the lock-out and the ferocious police baton charges that accompanied it were still fresh in the public memory when more civilian blood was shed on Bachelor’s Walk in July 1914.6

  On the day the Volunteers began their dramatic march to Howth the most exciting event envisaged in the city had been an experimental run by a fleet of eight motor buses between O’Connell Bridge and the Point Depot at the end of the North Wall. Motorised transport had first made an impact during the lock-out, when employers found that one lorry could do the work of nine horse-drawn carts. Lorries were also much better at breaking through strike pickets.

  Ironically, the debut of motorised buses would ultimately sound the death knell of the city’s tram system. It was the refusal of Dublin United Tramways Company to recognise the right of the ITGWU to represent its employees that sparked the lock-out. The chairman of the DUTC, William Martin Murphy, was Ireland’s richest Catholic entrepreneur.

  Many Dubliners, particularly the more respectable sort, wished to put the events of the previous year behind them. The great event of the summer of 1914 had been the Civic Exhibition, held in the grounds of the magnificent King’s Inns in Henrietta Street, designed by James Gandon. The exhibition featured examples of model housing schemes, garden cities, garden suburbs, model cottages, municipal displays, historical art and archaeology, industry and commerce, public health and food, child welfare, bee-keeping and much more. It showed Dubliners all these aspects of modern urban living that their city lacked and that might banish evil memories. The central theme of the exhibition was town planning, and the Lord Lieutenant, John Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, offered a prize of £500 for the best plan for housing Dublin’s 25,882 families then living in tenements. At the opening ceremony on Tuesday 14 July a telegram from King George v, read by Lord Aberdeen, expressed ‘the hope that it might result in an improvement in the housing conditions of Ireland.’

  In a veiled reference to the lock-out, the earl’s wife, Ishbel, explained that

  the housing and town planning section had its origin in the widespread feeling which arose out of the sad events of last winter, which made the whole country feel that the time had come when all classes and sections of the community must join to see that this reproach to the city of Dublin should be swept away.

  Unfortunately, the city’s 100,000 slum-dwellers were not present to hear her. The admission charge to the opening ceremony was 2s, equivalent to more than half a week’s rent for many of them. But a reduced rate of 6d was available on Wednesdays, when half-day closing might allow shop assistants to attend, and on Saturdays for other employees fortunate enough to work a 5½-day week.7

  The exhibition was extremely popular with the better-off members of society, attracting eighty thousand paying visitors.8 Katharine Tynan recalled:

  People could entertain their friends in the Dining Club—it was quite the thing to give luncheon and dinner parties there—there was a splendid dancing hall with room for the exclusive and the unexclusive … illuminated gardens, with all the fun of the fair, a cinema theatre, all sorts of amusements, as well as instructive habits.9

  While there was a consensus on the need to tackle Dublin’s housing problem, at least in official circles, the question was how. The neglect of successive British administrations had been aggravated by the lackadaisical and hamfisted manner in which the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, and his Cabinet colleagues in London handled the lock-out. Events during those dreadful months provided one of the best arguments yet for home rule. But would an Irish parliament and executive prove any better? The Irish Party had been thrown into disarray by the industrial warfare in Dublin and had been unable to take a position vis-à-vis capital and labour; neither had the corporation (city council), which had been deeply divided by the dispute.

  Some nationalists had been embarrassed by the lock-out. They perceived Dublin as the premier local authority in the country, even if Belfast had overtaken it in wealth and population. The corporation was held up as a model for the new home rule parliament; but many Dubliners regarded the ‘Corpo’ as a byword for corruption, dominated as it was by the same sort of small business interests and career politicians who filled the ranks of the Irish Party.10

  The inquiry was conducted by the Local Government Board, the body responsible for ensuring that local authorities lived up to their obligations. The initiative had been prompted by the Church Street tragedy of 2 September 1913, one week into the lock-out. Numbers 66 and 67 had collapsed that evening, killing seven people, including two children, aged four and five; another eight tenants were seriously injured. The number of deaths would have been much higher if all the tenants had been at home, or if a party for several hundred children in the Father Mathew Hall opposite the houses had ended early, as the rubble from the collapsing buildings had tumbled into the street.

  Housing was an emotive issue in Dublin. The tenements may have been a cause of shame for some and a health threat to all, but they were also the largest source of unearned income for the city’s middle classes. Landlords included such pillars of society as the chairman of Dublin United Tramways Company and president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, William Martin Murphy, and George Plunkett, papal count and father of the 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett. Their power was reflected in the presence of seventeen slum landlords—unionist and nationalist—on the corporation.11 This lobby resisted every effort by city officials and progressive councillors, mainly Labour representatives, to increase the expenditure on slum clearance. They were so successful that in the decade before 1914 domestic rates (a local tax on house property) were lower in Dublin than at any time in the previous century. Consequently, the corporation’s slum clearance schemes were drastically underfunded.

  Even the cost of acquiring properties for slum clearance was prohibitive, as landlords were entitled to compensation equivalent to ten years’ rental income.12 The most significant social housing initiatives were undertaken by private bodies, such as the Iveagh Trust and the Dublin Artisans’ Dwellings Company. However, these projects were self-financing, which meant they provided accommodation to slightly better-off working-class families that could afford rents of 5s a week. Some 70 per cent of tenement dwellers paid rents of 3s 6d or less.

  The inevitable result was that Dublin had the worst housing of any city in the United Kingdom. In 1913 there were 25,822 families living in tenements, four out of five of them in a single room and 1,560 in cellars. There were 1,300 derelict sites in the city, eleven of them in Church Street before the collapse. The sheer size of the problem made enforcement of the housing by-laws impossible. Even after the Church Street disaster only twenty-six dwellings in the city were closed as insanitary, and not a single prosecution was begun for overcrowding, compared with 689 cases taken against women living in these tenements for prostitution. Church Street, which contained by no means the worst houses, had an average of five people to a room. In total almost 23 per cent of the city population lived in one-room tenements, compared with 13 per cent in Glasgow and 0.03 per cent in Belfast. A report prepared by officials of the Housing Committee stated:

  These figures speak for themselves. There are many tenement houses with … between 40 and 50 souls. We have visited one house that we found to be occupied by 98 persons, another by 74 and a third by 73.

  The entrance to all tenement houses is by a common door off either a street, lane or alley, and in most cases the door is never shut, day or night. The passages and stairs are common, and the rooms all open directly either off the passages or landings … Generally, the only water supply is … a single tap … in the yard.

  Toilets, or ‘closets’, were either in the yard or, worse still, in the basement, so that residents might have to come down three or four storeys to use them. Access to the toilets was open ‘to anyone who likes to come in off the streets, and is, of course, common to both sexes.’ The buildings were dilapidated and ‘in a filthy condition, and in nearly every case human excreta is to be fo
und scattered about the yards and on the floors of the closets, and in some cases, even in the passages of the house itself.’

  Such drawbacks did not prevent yards, stairways and even closets being used for casual sex. Understandably, many tenement residents, especially women, used the yard closets only for slopping out chamber pots. The officials concluded that ‘we cannot conceive how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use accommodation such as we have seen.’ Yet, in spite of all the handicaps, the report paid tribute to the efforts made ‘by many of the occupants to keep their rooms tidy, and the walls are often decorated with pictures.’13

  The poor sanitation was aggravated by an inadequate drainage system, incapable of removing the raw sewage and resulting in a sickly-sweet aroma hanging over large areas of the city. Not surprisingly, all sorts of health problems flowed from this infrastructural deficit. Death rates for Dublin, which included the much healthier environs of Rathmines, Pembroke, Clontarf, Blackrock, Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) and Howth, remained consistently above those for Belfast and for British cities. In 1913 the rate of 23.1 per thousand compared with 18.4 in Belfast, 14.3 in London and 12.8 in Bristol. In the first quarter of 1914, when the effects of the lock-out were at their height, the death rate rose to 25.9 per thousand and the child mortality rate rose by almost 50 per cent. The general filth and overcrowding ensured that child mortality rates were the worst in Europe. Every year infectious and communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, diarrhoea, whooping cough and sexually transmitted diseases (then known as venereal disease) accounted for more than a third of all deaths in Dublin.14

  Whatever about the ratepayers, the blindness of employers to the problem was hard to understand. There was a consensus that bad housing was a major contributory factor to the labour troubles of 1913. ‘Decently housed men would never have fallen such a complete prey to mob oratory,’ bewailed the Irish Builder, and it was widely accepted that one reason that the general secretary of the ITGWU, Jim Larkin, made few inroads into firms such as Guinness’s and the railway companies was that they provided decent housing for employees. The Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, vowed after reading the inquiry’s findings that ‘this report cannot be allowed to rest, as so many other reports have done’; but he was soon to be overwhelmed by other events.15

  The findings of the inquiry and the five months of violent industrial conflict in the city had caused few in the ranks of the city’s middle-class establishment to change their views. Father Tom Finlay, regarded as a very progressively minded Jesuit, had told the Catholic Commercial Club in 1901 that ‘religion must be the dominant influence in every sphere of life,’ but in 1914 he had no difficulty in rejecting the notion that an increase in the wages of unskilled labourers would help alleviate their suffering and stabilise social relations in the city. ‘If it paid the employers of Dublin to give higher wages they would give them,’ he told the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society in March. However,

  the public were not given to acts of generosity of this kind on a large scale. They thought charity was charity and business was business, and the law of business, as they understood it, was always to purchase in the cheapest market.16

  Unfortunately the Local Government Board report, published in January 1914, was too comprehensive and too honest for its own good. It criticised the city’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Charles Cameron, for granting rebates in rates to councillors who owned slum property and who made false claims for renovation. The council rallied to Cameron’s defence and pointed to his long record of public service, both voluntary and paid, from the 1860s.

  Within two weeks an alliance stretching from William Martin Murphy’s Irish Independent to Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin was united in condemnation of the report. In May the nationalist majority on the corporation produced a detailed critique of the inquiry’s findings that not alone questioned its methods but claimed that the Local Government Board was responsible for the housing problem through its own inactivity and was now using it to justify interference with the autonomy of the city fathers. Above all, the inquiry’s recommendations were damned as expensive, impractical and a classic example of ‘Britain’s malign interference in Irish affairs.’17

  Dubliners were divided by religion as well as class. There were more than 92,000 Protestants in the city and county, the largest concentration outside Belfast. While they had not been a majority in the city since the early eighteenth century, they had dominated its political, social and economic life well into the nineteenth, and the residue of their historic primacy still left its mark in the twentieth. By 1911 Protestants formed less than 17 per cent of the city’s population but remained a majority of those engaged in banking, senior business management and many of the higher professions. Catholics now formed a slight majority in the junior ranks of the law, medicine and accountancy. Even in such areas as the appointment of Justices of the Peace, where nationalist political influence with the Liberal government might have been expected to have made inroads, almost two-thirds of Dublin JPs were Protestants, compared with 42 per cent in Ireland as a whole.18

  The dominance of Protestants was most marked in the higher reaches of social and economic life. All the directors of the Bank of Ireland were Protestants, and all but two of them signed a public letter sent by southern Unionists to the government in November 1913 warning of the dire economic consequences of home rule. This might explain why the bank had few customers among the rising Catholic middle class in the provinces, but it was still a power to be reckoned with in the capital. The larger manufacturing, engineering and railway companies were also largely the preserve of the old Protestant commercial elite.19

  Of course the majority of Dublin Protestants were not wealthy, but they were not poor either. Martin Maguire, historian of the city’s Protestant working class, puts the number of male Protestant workers at less than six thousand in the early 1900s, with another four thousand in the county. There were as many relatively prosperous Protestant white-collar workers and shopkeepers. The only unskilled occupation where Protestants outnumbered Catholics was soldiering; and the British garrison added 3,100 working-class Protestant males to the population on the eve of the First World War.20

  Inevitably, the majority Catholic populace saw their Protestant counterparts as privileged. As a child growing up in the city, the future republican activist Christopher (‘Todd’) Andrews felt that

  Dublin at the turn of the century … was divided into two classes: the rulers and the ruled. The rulers were mainly Protestants, the Catholics the ruled. The Catholics at whatever income level they had attained were second-class citizens.

  Protestants were ‘as remote from us as if they had been blacks and we whites,’ Andrews recalled.21 His own family ran a dairy in Summerhill and could afford to send him to university. Idealistic and ambitious, Andrews was one of a new generation of nationalists who grew up with a heightened awareness of what a difference religion could make in the higher reaches of society, and he resented it deeply. It is not surprising, therefore, that he drew attention to the gulf between the two main religious communities in Dublin; but there was one important way in which they differed from their counterparts in the North that went largely unremarked: they were not segregated in rival ghettoes. Working-class Dublin Protestants lived cheek by hungry jowl with working-class Catholics and endured the same hardships and insecurity. Andrews reflected a widely held perception when he wrote that ‘there were many poor Protestants in Dublin but never destitute Protestants.’22 Even allowing for a certain exaggeration, the autobiographies of Seán O’Casey testify otherwise, and poor Protestants who encountered such agencies as the Church of Ireland relief scheme in Ringsend could testify that the charity of their social superiors was as hard-faced and tight-fisted as that of the Catholic middle classes and clergy.

  Both denominations used the workhouse as the benchmark for awarding food and money. The Ringsend establishment paid 10d for an eight-hour day chopping wood. It was run by
the Church Army, an Anglican response to the Salvation Army. The title of the institution—the Church Army Labour Homes for Criminals, Inebriates, Tramps and Deserving Unemployed—was a mission statement in itself.

  This lack of social solidarity within Dublin’s Protestant community was the result of a long process of gradual decline dating, ironically, from the series of economic problems that followed the Act of Union in 1801. Until well after Catholic Emancipation in 1829 there had been a strong sense of community among the city’s embattled Protestant minority, and Dublin had been a byword for Protestant militancy since the seventeenth century, its skilled artisans providing the rank and file of the Orange militia to protect local liberties. There was sectarian rioting in Dublin as late as the First Home Rule Crisis of the mid-1880s, when shots were fired from the Conservative Working Men’s Club in York Street on nationalist rioters.23

  But the skilled artisan became an endangered species as traditional manufacturing declined. Skilled occupations such as weaving gave way to unskilled or semi-skilled employment in the brewing and confectionery industries, where some of the jobs were filled by Catholic women workers as well as men. W. and R. Jacob, which became one of Dublin’s largest employers of female labour, bought out an ailing coach-making concern to build its factory in Bishop Street. That the Jacob family were Quakers simply underlined the fact that religious considerations played second fiddle in the new industrial economy.24 One consequence was that skilled Protestant workers comprised a disproportionately high share of Dubliners emigrating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  The one significant area of growth in employment for skilled workers was provided by the railway and tram works at Inchicore; but local Protestant craft workers often lacked the necessary skills to find jobs there, and instead positions were filled by craftsmen from Britain. Far from subscribing to Dublin’s Protestant working-class traditions, British craftsmen often married local Catholic women. Although 42 per cent of skilled workers in Inchicore were Protestant by 1913, it was a Labour Party stronghold during the lock-out, and the workers were impervious to the appeal of unionism. William Partridge, one of the Labour councillors for New Kilmainham, was the son of an English train driver who had married the daughter of a Catholic farmer while working in Athlone. Partridge was brought up as a Catholic, and he proved a devout one. During the lock-out he corresponded at length with the Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, explaining the workers’ case to him.25