Vol. 1. No.3 SEPTEMBER, 1938.
ByThomas King Moylan

DUBLIN'S DEBT TO THE HOUSE OF INDUSTRY cont.

In those days prisoners were not fed by the state; they begged at the gaol gates and depended on this and on the alms of their friends for subsistence. The law made beggars of them; it even made beggars of their gaolers, as when the Keeper of the House of Correction pleaded in 1684 for some help towards maintaining a “a madd woman” in his custody since the previous June. The City Assembly granted him £3 in respect of a period of ten months. Those who have read accounts in Gilbert (i. 264-75) of the Black Dog and Newgate can visualise some part of the wretchedness of the sane and able-bodied prisoners incarcerated there. No bearable picture could be drawn of the lot of those inmates who were mentally afflicted. But there were no other places to which such could be sent. Nevertheless the eighteenth century, that great era of intense philanthropic effort in Dublin, was on its way and one can imagine that the light of its dawn was visible in 1699. An anonymous donor had offered £2,000 towards “erecting an Hospitall for the reception of aged lunaticks and other diseased persons.” Certain of the City Commons petitioned the Assembly that the Treasurer might payout £200 sterling towards this laudable object and, as if the light of the approaching century had enabled them to see about them more clearly, they urged it with the reproach “there being noe citty in the world soe considerable as this citty of Dublin where there is not some such.” It was a cry from the heart, a shamed and humble acknowledgment of their failure to provide for God’s afflicted. They resolved to adapt the ground in James’s Street to the purpose, but in 1701, the Master of the House of Correction is still appealing for an allowance for the support of lunatics in his care, and he is allowed two shillings per week for every insane person committed to his custody. The ground in James’s Street is turned over to the Workhouse, commenced in 1704, which, from the very first set its face against harbouring the disabled poor. Nevertheless, in 1708, Sir William Fownes, Lord Mayor, had six strong cells constructed in the Workhouse for the more violent lunatics, and in 1727 there were upwards of 40 confined there. When the institution became solely a Foundling Hospital most of the insane were got rid of and no further cases were admitted. The insane continued to be nobody’s children until St. Patrick’s, melancholy legacy of Dean Swift, was opened in 1757. It was intended for the poor, but the lack of proper endowment forced the Governors to accept paying patients so that they might support at least some poor people, about 30 in all. What might
have been the ultimate course of the treatment of the insane in Dublin would be difficult to guess, had not the vagabonds and sturdy beggars of Dublin continued to prove themselves a nuisance.

These roamed the highways and the byways like brigands, harrying and plundering the passing citizens. But now the citizens no longer retreated, they acted on the offensive, they sent their black carts and their beadles into College Green and
Skinners’ Row and Christchurch Lane. They locked their prisoners up in Channel Row and looked about for fresh fields to conquer. One morning, in 1774, a poor woman in the House of Industry, one “Rose D—“ became “outragious,” which was a common expression then to denote a maniacal outburst on the part of an insane person. So she was sent to the Bridewell in James’s Street. A month later the Governors had a look at this Bridewell, in which they found “one mad woman, one foolish ditto, one ditto subject to fits, and one boy fool.” Threepence per day was the cost of keep. Next year, Dr. Rainey came to the conclusion that the insane in the Bridewell would derive no benefit from medicines until a proper place was fitted up for them in the House of Industry, but it took the Governors eight months just to concur in that idea without, however, doing anything to implement it, although they did erect some cells on their own ground in Channel Row. In 1783 they ordered the Minister of the Parish of St. James, the Chaplain of the Workhouse, and the Medical Officers of the House of Industry to visit the Bridewell and report thereon. The laconic report of the visitors is still on record. It reads: “There are seven women and five men lunatics who appeared to be as well treated as creatures in their circumstances require - their straw clean and sufficient, their bread good and enough of it twice a day." Cold and inhuman as we regard this report the Governors took it as complimentary and continued to send insane persons there. It was a shocking place. Besides the insane it housed profligate men and women and young boys, all mixed indiscriminately, half starved, and ill-clothed. In August, 1785, three of the Governors visited it, Rev. Mr. Gamble, Rev. Dr. Lyster and Mr. Cunningham, whose report was that they found 14 lunatics there from the House of Industry, “most of them in want of clothing, some entirely naked.” Two months later the Governors ordered all the insane in the Bridewell, belonging to the House of Industry, to be brought back to the House and that resolution might be said to have inaugurated systematic public provision for the insane poor of Dublin. This provision at first consisted of a large apartment divided into stalls in which the patients were chained. There is an entry in the Minute Books “Ordered that the Steward shall take care that the fetters of the lunatics be properly guarded with listing” - that is, that the irons should be wrapped in strips of woollen selvedge to prevent chafing of the wrists and ankles. The apartment in which they were housed was named the Bethlehem, after the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane in London, a name usually corrupted into Bedlam. As in London, the Dublin Bedlam became one of the sights of the city, the resort of morbid idlers who rated it merely as a sort of bear-garden. The Governors, however, soon forbade entry without written permission.

Crude as was the provision for the insane poor in the home of the Dublin Beggar it was sufficiently in advance of anything of its kind in Ireland to attract applications for admission from all parts of the country. Cells were constructed in the grounds, but by 1810 the entire accommodation for the insane was insufficient to meet the demand, and in that year the Governors when submitting to Government their estimate of expenses for the coming year included a sum of £12,000 for building a general asylum for the reception of patients from all parts of the kingdom. The site chosen was a piece of ground between the House of Industry and Grangegorman Lane and on it they erected a building, the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, to accommodate 250 patients. When partly completed it was occupied by patients from the House of Industry, who entered into it on 1st April, 1814, a date possibly fixed by accident but suggestive of sardonic humour. This building, considerably enlarged, is still in use. The original name was given to it in courtesy to the Lord Lieutenant in whose Vice-Royalty the project was initiated, Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond. It was built for the purpose which it has since served and was never, as is somewhat widely believed, a hunting lodge of the Duke of Richmond. Its name was changed in 1921 to the Grangegorman Mental Hospital.

When the Governors of the House of Industry had settled on their site for an asylum, the Lord Lieutenant approved of their negotiating for further ground adjoining on which the Government intended to erect a penitentiary. In the old days the city gaols,
houses of correction, marshalseas and sponging houses were not intended for long term prisoners. They were mainly for debtors, professional beggars, dissolute women, swashbuckling drunkards, and highway robbers between their capture and their execution.

Criminals of the more dangerous type - that is in the eyes of the law - those who took away another’s property, were transported to the Plantations abroad. In 1811 three youths were each sentenced to transportation for seven years - the first aged 17 for
taking money, the second aged 21 for stealing a sheet and a table-cloth, and the third, also aged 21, for stealing two shirts and a shawl. It cost £150 per head to transport a prisoner. Whether the motives were humanitarian or economic the Governors of the House of Industry tried to reform the criminals, and for 7 months in 1809 they maintained 20 male convicts in the prison ward of the House. In addition, at the request of the Lord Lieutenant they managed a Penitentiary for Females at Smithfield. This old building still stands at the north-east upper side of Smithfield; it is number 26 and is used by a cattle salesmaster. A large portion of the prison section at the back, can still be seen, but it has been cut down from three to two storeys. Adjoining are the ruins of the old Fever Hospital of Brown Street, at one time also managed by the Governors of the House of Industry. Both are gloomy piles. In the Female Penitentiary a limited number of women were housed and engaged in sewing and other work of the kind. On one occasion Sir. E. Stanley visited the Smithfield establishment and was so pleased with the demeanour of the inmates he set them at liberty and told them to go. The unhappy women on being turned out did not know what to do with themselves, so they went in a body to the House of Industry where they put their miserable plight before the Governors, who allowed them to return to the penitentiary, which they did joyfully. There were some who did not face that building with pleasure, such as the three poor girls, aged 12, 14 and 17, whom the Governors ordered to be sent there and confined in a dark cell. Boys were also sent to the Penitentiary or more probably to the old Fever Hospital adjoining. When refractory they had a small log fastened to the ankle by a chain about 2 feet long, “as a mark,” say the Records, “of reproach and punishment “! If well behaved they were, at a very early age, allowed to join the British navy, whose recruiting sloops regularly appeared in the Liffey.

So successful did the efforts of the Governors of the House of Industry appear in the management of these penitentiaries, and of the one in James’s Street also under their care, that they were asked to supervise the erection of the Grangegorman Penitentiary
in Grangegorman Lane. This building was constructed on the plan most up-to-date in 1810. It aimed principally at the reformation of the prisoner by a well-defined course of solitary confinement, partial association and eventual industry in the common
workshops. It had a chequered history, sometimes housing women prisoners only, sometimes both sexes, and sometimes political prisoners only, After a period of disuse it was handed to the Asylum in 1897 and now houses the offices and stores of the
Mental Hospital. Part of the prison garden was set aside in 1832; as a cemetery for victims of the cholera epidemic, and stands to-day abandoned and neglected within high stone walls.

This paper can merely outline some of the activities following the establishment of the House of Industry. It is in no sense an adequate account of that institution whose full story has yet to be compiled, and it is a story which should be written because
as Dr. Kirkpatrick says, “round this House of Industry might be written the history of Irish Medicine for the past one hundred and fifty years.” What I have been able to tell of its life and times has been culled mainly from the Minute Books . These, written in cold, precise paragraphs, are the products of an official mind, and from their pages the personal prejudices and inclinations of the recorder are sedulously excluded. But
human nature cannot be suppressed even in official records. There is a stirring of dry bones, the buzz of pleasurable excitement, the joyful anticipations in even the bare record of the Governor’s order in 1809 that the Officers’ House is to be illuminated on the night of the General Illumination, and a large bonfire lighted in front of the House when the Governors do dine at their own expense to celebrate the beginning of the fiftieth year of the Reign of His Most Gracious Majesty King George III,. and to preserve order amongst the poor who, this night, are to have half a pound of meat without bone and a pint of porter each.

Again the human touch appears in the order for the fat cow that was to be slaughtered for the inmates’ dinner on Christmas Day, but the pleasurable thoughts associated with Christmas festivities are chilled when one notices the year- 1798. The thought strikes one - has it been possible for even official aloofness to keep out of the records every indication of the momentuous events of a year so graven in the Irish mind ? One searches for some reflection of that blazing time, but the Minutes keep on recording orders that the beadles are to rid the wards of dogs, that Rooney the lunatic be given a pair of new shoes at a cost of twelve English shillings, that a sum of five guineas is to be paid for the new stocks, and then one drops haphazardly on this solitary reminder
of a year which needs no written record to keep alive :15th November, 1798.

“WHEREAS it appears by an Act of the last Session of Parliament that Wm James McNevin, Doctor of Physick, one of the Physicians of the House of Industry, hath confessed himself guilty of High Treason and besought His Majesty that all further prosecution should stop and surcease on condition of his banishment from His Majesty’s dominions:
RESOLVED: That the said Wm James McNevin be and he is hereby
removed from the said place of office of one of the Physicians to the
House of Industry.”

The Resolution mattered little to Dr. MacNeven. At the time he was incarcerated in Fort George, in Inverness, from which he was not released until the Treaty of Amiens, after which he went to France. He never saw the House of Industry again.

So we, too, may take leave of the House and all it stands for. But let this point not be forgotten nor overlooked-the House of Industry, the Richmond, Whitworth and Hardwicke Hospitals, the adoption of a more enlightened prison system, and above all, the great progress made on the long hard road from the “clean and sufficient straw” of the lunatic cells in the old Foundling Hospital to the modern humanitarian treatment of the insane in the Mental Hospitals of Dublin, are all directly due to the
Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars of Dublin, to their love of liberty and passion for freedom which sent them wandering abroad.

And how can we take leave of them more fittingly than in the company of Dr. William James MacNeven, whose love of liberty,and passion for freedom sent him, too, “wandering abroad ?”