The ‘Slums of Dublin’ series in the Freeman’s Journal, 26 and 27 September 1884, carried the following account of the once great thoroughfares of Church Street and Bow Street behind the Four Courts.
Written in the usual moralistic tone adopted by the Freeman for articles of this type, it does however contain some interesting nuggets regarding these two historic streets at their nadir.
While the Church Street area ceased to be aristocratic by the mid-18th century, a lively merchant class thrived there for another half-century or so until a combination of economic decline due to the Act of Union and an influx of poverty- stricken refugees from the country during and after the Famine put an end to any pretense of prosperity.
Here are these streets in 1884 as viewed through the jaundiced eye of the Freeman:
“On a Sunday morning, the neighbourhood of Church Street is not particularly savoury. The relics of Saturday’s debauch, reveling, and disorder are to be found at every step. Broken glass, broken flowerpots, broken bottles, broken delft, cups, saucers and plates, strew the roadway – memorials of the conflicts which have made the night unwholesome and provided the magistrates with an opportunity of earning their modest stipends.
Not many of the inhabitants are to be found answering to the summons of the chapel bell to attend the Holy Sacrifice. Dozens of them are, indeed, to be found sitting on the doorsteps, quaffing the morning air as an antidote to the dissipation of the previous night. Men loll sleepily in the halls, hardly yet recovered from the Saturday’s inebriation, and women with bandaged heads, the token of marital affection, abound.
From these wretched habitations, the only human beings who seek the house of prayer are the little children. Clad in their unwashed rags, they put on some brightness in the shape of clean faces and feet, and little tatterdemalions as they are, the Sunday morning appears to provide the only bright hour of their young lives. Business and piety are frequently combined; the little ones who seek the blessings of heaven in church are also commissioned to complete the family marketing. The father does not come home early on the Saturday night; when he does the mother is frequently incapacitated from family duty, and the night is often spent in quarrelling. What money they have left from the weekly dissipation has to be expended on the Sunday morning, and the children then are the only capable financiers. Preternaturally shrewd, they are able to drive a hard bargain with the neighbouring hucksters (and the Church Street neighbourhood is pretty well stocked with them).
Church Street has its own peculiar history. An inhabitant who knows the neighbourhood for the past forty years was able to give a vivid picture of its decay. Forty years ago, it was a wealthy street. Its houses were occupied by substantial citizens engaged in the provision trade and acquiring wealth through the then adjacent markets. The relics of old decency are still to be found in the frontages of the older houses of the street. Then the traders live on the premises in which they made their money and took care to be comfortably housed. The street used to be lined with country carts bringing produce in to feed the busy citizens of the metropolis. The poorer population lived in the courts and alleys, not in the tenements in the front of the street, and hence the small cottages of these byways are accounted for.
Even forty years ago the neighbourhood was a lively one. It had always a sporting character. Those were the days of prizefighting and cock fighting, and the old inhabitant can still point out the sites of cockpits where many thousands of pounds changed hands at many a main.
I have intimated that in this, as in other such districts, a considerable sprinkling of respectable artisans is to be found in residence; but the population is mainly composed of those who live by chance employments. An examination of twenty houses all let out in tenements only revealed the existence of one artisan (a carpenter) in regular employment. How the other inhabitants live, they themselves can hardly tell. The men sometimes work; the women seldom, and, when possible, the children steal or devote themselves to wood selling or begging. Sometimes they sell fish in the street, sometimes fruit, and at all times the children are the most steady and reliable contributors to the family exchequer. Many of the men are engaged at the markets in the morning and, having earned a shilling or two before noon, devote the rest of the day to idleness and dissipation. They are not all tenement houses in Church Street, but they are all fully populated.
In the midst of the unlovely lives of most of these poor people Charity still holds a hallowed place. In many a humble home I found that the wretched poor gave refuge to those more wretched than themselves. Orphan boys and girls shared the meals of half starving families and found shelter or the night in miserable homes. A homeless wanderer from the country is welcome to the most overcrowded room, and homeless wanderers find their way to the district in such numbers that it is not an unusual thing to find elderly women who rent single rooms subletting them practically by the square yard.
Frequently, young men from the country seek those places innocently and, once having stepped into the spider’s parlour, their descent in the moral grade is rapid and almost hopeless. They become the ‘corner boys’ of Dublin and are best known in the police courts. In the same way, young women of scanty means, seeking humble homes, become the inhabitants of these fetid dens, in the end lose all sense of womanliness, and are transformed into the sexless creatures who divide their lives between the public house and the police cell.
Bow Street is an odious precinct, but it is what the property owners have made it. It is not generally known that some of the worst houses – those in which the vicious have established their worst dens – belong to a public man who devotes himself to literature and to the propagation of national sentiment. Others are the property of a citizen whose name frequently appears as a generous contributor to Dublin charities. To be sure, these owners seldom visit their tenants. They employ agents just a degree above the social scale of the rent payers. The houses in St Michan’s parish are none of them very highly valued by the rating authorities, but they are valuable properties to the landlords.
As a matter of fact, the best kept tenements are those of which comparatively humble people are the owners. A court in Church Street is owned by a widow who makes her living by selling second-hand clothes in Mary’s Lane. The widow makes a decent income out of the court. Each of its six houses contains our apartments, which are let at one shilling and fourpence each room to small families. The widow objects to overcrowding, and keeps her little court in good, whitewashed order.
In Church Street and its by-ways are to be found a number of what are politely called ‘eating houses.’ They are permitted to be open until three in the morning and do their most lucrative business after the closing of the public houses. A bountiful supply of bacon and cabbage can be had for 4 pence, but, by way of indication of the class of customers, it is sufficient to state that the knives and forks are chained to the wooden tables and the cruet stands nailed down.
Anyone who wants drink after hours can easily obtain it in the northern purlieus. Go down into a certain cellar, for instance, and a woman can be found whose dress is lined with pockets each containing a bottle of porter.
Respectable men are frequently brought to these ‘shebeens’ by touts, male and female, who linger about the thoroughfares into the small hours of the morning, and the scenes of debauchery are usually kept up until daylight. The young people who earn what they can by vending all kinds of petty merchandise, at night returning home tired and wearied, are the best customers of the shebeens and the most accomplished candidates for the police cells. After their debauch they go to bed in the lodging houses or their own tenements, idle the forepart of the day away and are only anxious by their evening’s work to acquire enough to continue their system of life.
There are of course redeeming traits to be found. Talk to the worst of them and they will tell you that if they could see their way to more respectable lives, they would adopt them. But they ask, “What can we do?’ ‘Cannot you live elsewhere and in better places?’ ‘Where are we to find them, Sir?’ is the certain reply. Not one half of these people are contented with their lives and their surrounds. If they could obtain better dwellings at cheap rates, they would be only too glad to inhabit them.”
If the last sentence was a hint to wealthy readers of the Freeman, no one took it. The unfortunate residents of Church Street and Bow Street were to remain living in terrible conditions until a tragedy decades later finally provoked action to improve their circumstances. More to come!
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