Between the Old and New Road to the Sea.

CHAPTER X.

Between the Old and the New Roads to the Sea

AFTER the old road to Ballybough Bridge the next district of the north city is that between Marlborough Street and Amiens Street, and the present road thence from the city, by the North Strand, to Clontarf and the sea. Eden Quay was called the Iron Quay a hundred and fifty years ago. it derives its present name from William Eden, first Lord Auckland, who had been Chief Secretary some fourteen years before the quay received its new name in 1796.

In a letter written by him in 1782 he requests that his name may be bestowed on some new street, “if our great plans should ever go into execution for the improvement of Dublin.” The letter is addressed to the Right Hon. John Beresford, a member of the great family, who lived in Marlborough Street, and a man who wielded immense political power.

Whatever objections may be urged against his use of this, it cannot be denied that he effected much in the adornment of this city. He was Chief Commissioner of the Revenue for twenty-two most fateful years of the history of Ireland, from 1780 to 1802. To him we owe the Custom House, built in 1791 by James Lever, the father of the novelist – the building of the Custom House, with quay and docks, is said to have cost half a million of money. The fine crescent called Beresford Place was named after him.

Northumberland Buildings at the end of the quay, and Northumberland Square adjoining, are called after Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland, Lord Lieutenant 1829-30, who is described as very wealthy and generous. The hotel at the corner bears the inscription, ” Northumberland Chop House, 1829.”

Chop houses were then common in Dublin and London. A ship’s instrument shop on Eden Quay bore for many years, until about two years ago, an effigy. of a little wooden midshipman, in imitation of such a shop and such an effigy in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, some scenes of which are laid in a quarter of London corresponding to this Port district of Dublin. Another memorial of the story was Florence Place called after the heroine. It was on the East Wall, between Mayor Street and the North Wall, and disappeared in 1875, the houses being demolished when the Great Southern Railway Station was built, thus suffering the fate of a locality in the story.

(Dickens has been honoured in Dublin by the name of Pickwick Place, off Great Strand Street, built the year after the appearance (1837) of Pickwick; and by the name of Nickleby built in 1840, a year after that book was published. Nickleby, off Mecklenburgh Street, was absorbed by the Penitentiary in 1896. Pickwick Place exists still but has borne no name-plate for many years. It must originally have been not unlike some of the London inns in the book.

Marlborough Street is called on the older maps Great Marlborough Street from the great Duke of Marlborough, front whose time it dates. The projected neighbouring Blenheim Street was called after his “glorious victory.”

Tyrone House in Marlborough Street, which has been the Office of the Commissioners of National Education since 1835, (The Offices of the Board, for the first three years of its existence, 1832-5, were in Mornington House, 24 Upper Merrion Street, the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington, now the office of the Land Commission.) was built for the Beresford family, Earls of Tyrone, by Richard Cassells in 1741, being the first stone private house erected in Dublin. The ancient Irish county name which it bears was conferred in 1886 on the adjoining Upper Mecklenburgh Street, which joins Marlborough Street with Lower Gardiner Street. About three years afterwards the name was also appropriated by the longer and more eastern Lower Mecklenburgh Street. Similar]y the eastern end of Lower Gloucester Street, between Buckingham Street and the North Strand, has been re-named Killarney Street, but no appropriation of this name by the rest of Gloucester Street has taken place as yet.

Great Martin’s Lane was in 1765 named Mecklenburgh Street from Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburgh who had been married four years earlier to George III. Up to sixty or seventy years ago physicians, barristers and attorneys resided in this street. The Misses Gunning, so celebrated in the eighteenth century, of whom one became Countess of Coventry and another Duchess of Hamilton and afterwards Duchess of Argyll, were born at their father’s residence in this street. As already mentioned the Botanic Garden of the Royal Dublin Society was at Great Martin’s Lane or Mecklenburgh Street from 1735 until 1795, when it was transferred to its present position in Glasnevin. Little Martin’s Lane was in 1811 named Beaver Street. Palace Yard near this was not so magnificent as the name would seem to imply. Uxbridge in this district is called after the Marquess of Anglesey who was Lord Lieutenant 1828-9 and 1830-3. He was also Earl of Uxbridge and, under this title, was distinguished in the Waterloo campaign where he lost a leg.

The aristocratic character of the neighbourhood in the eighteenth century may be conjectured from its containing the fine residence of the Beresford family. In those days Great Marlborough Street ended at the corner of Lower Abbey Street, then called Ship Buildings. There was a narrow lane to the riverside called Ferryboat Lane or Union Lane a hundred and fifty years ago. When this lane was widened the new short street to Eden Quay was for some years after 1776 called Union Street before it became merged in Marlborough Street. In the old days of Great Marlborough Street a large house’ stood at its junction with Abbey Street, the residence of George Felster, a wealthy merchant.

The Earl of Tyrone was in 1789 created Marquess of Waterford and the house is called Waterford House on maps after that year, but the original name seems to have held its ground. The ghostly legend embodied by Sir Walter Scott in his impressive poem, The Eve of St. John, was borrowed, as he acknowledges, from a ghost story told of Lady Beresford and the Earl of Tyrone.

(William Beresford,the victor of Albuera in the Peninsular War, who was created Field Marshal and Viscount, was a member of this family. Another, whose fame is of a different sort, was John Claudius Beresford, whose Riding School, near the Talbot Street side of the premises, is said to have been a place of torture by flogging for suspected persons in 1798. He resided in the large house 9 Upper Buckingham Street, afterwards St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital. But the most notable and powerful member of the family was the Commissioner of Revenue, already mentioned, who caused the new Custom House to be built in this neighbourhood)

Marlborough Bowling Green, a fashionable place of resort from the middle of the eighteenth century, was situated in the block formed by Marlborough Street, Talbot Street, Gardiner Street and Abbey Street This once interesting block contained other noteworthy places long gone.

There is an old novel which firJt appeared in 1798 and which is still published and read, the Children of the Abbey, by Mrs. Regina Roche, a Waterford lady. In this picture of eighteenth-century Irish fashionable life joined to an ultra-sentimental melodrama now laughable, Capel Street appears as the fashionable promenade of Dublin, and Marlborough Green is visited as a matter of course. Marlborough Green is said to have received its death-blow as a fashionable resort from an unfortunate occurrence in 1761. Lord Westmeath’s son and heir was killed in a duel by Captain O’Rellly, and the quarrel began in Marlborough Green.

The projected Blenheim Street was also in this block. It appears in maps and directories in the end of the eighteenth century and disappears in the thirties of the nineteenth. It was to have run from 86 Talbot Street, now the newly built Belfast Bank. The house demolished a few years ago bore the inscription “Carolin’s Buildings, 1810,” that old Dublin mercantile family having built many houses in this district.

Blenheim Street was to have joined Talbot Street to Abbey Street, and the southern portion of it was transformed into Northumberland Square in 1844. Much of the site of Blenheim Street with other places adjoining, like the Jewish Synagogue of 1746 in Marlborough Green, the Velvet Manufactory of a century ago near Trinity Church, and Pugh’s Glass Factory in Potter’s Alley, has been absorbed by the large premises of Brooks, Thomas and Co.

The street now called Talbot Street dates also from the end of the eighteenth century. It appears on maps in 1800 as (North) Cope Street, but this name was probably applied to the western end, for the name “Moland Street 1810” was to be found, until the name Talbot Street was recently unnecessarily painted over it, on an old name-plate on the house at the corner of Talbot Street and Gardiner Street, the corner of the Marlborough Green block, now occupied by Messrs. McArthur. The date on the name-plate was 1810, and in Campbell’s Map of Dublin, 1811, the eastern half of Talbot Street appears as Moland Street, the western being marked Cope Street. The present Talbot Street thoroughfare terminated then at the corner of Mabbot Street. The portion to Amiens Street had not yet been made The name Moland Street in older maps and directories, beginning with 1795 is applied to another projected street in this Marlborough Green block.

This other projected Moland Street stretches, on the maps, from the projected Blenheim Street eastwards to the foot of Mabbot Street, including the present Beresford Lane and Frenchman’s Lane. The latter name is found in Rocque’s Map of Dublin, 1756. The same map marks Cezar’s Lane, long since vanished, off Frenchman’s Lane. An extinct street called Lime Street is on this map. It ran from Frenchman’s Lane to what is now Beresford Place (The Strand) parallel to the present Lower Gardiner Street.

Moland Street or Cope Street was renamed Talbot Street in 1821 after Charles, Earl Talbot, who was then Lord Lieutenant. The name Moland is that of a family who are returned in Valuation Office blue-books of sixty years ago conjointly with a family named Deverell, as owners of property in the district. Hence the name of Deverell Place off Lower Gardiner Street, the rere entrance to the premises of the Commissioners of National Education. Moland Place, dating from 1840, preserves the name. It is beside the Welsh Church, erected in 1838. Many of the small Welsh colony in Dublin have always resided in this district.

This neighbourhood must ever remain associated with the name of Charles Lever. He was born at 35 Amiens Street, (According to Fitzpatrick, but a correspondent of the Irish Builder, June, 1891, asserts that he was born in Mulberry Lodge, Philipsburgh Lane (this is the house now known as 6 Philipsburgh Avenue), and that he lived at the present No. 67 Talbot Street) demolished a few years ago to make way for the Loop Line Railway. The house was the residence of his father, James Lever, an Englishman, an architect and builder employed on the adjoining new Custom House. James Lever assisted also in the erection of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and was on friendly terms with some of the first professors. The novelist was born in Amiens Street on the 1st of September, i8o6.

The late Dr. W. J. Fitzpatrick is in error when he states, in his Life of Lever, that Amiens Street received its name from the Peace of Amiens concluded in 1802. The name is found in 1800 and is derived from the title Viscount Amiens, a minor title of the Earl of Aldborough, who built AI. Aldborough House close by.

Charles Lever lived afterwards and practised as a young physician in another house built by his father and still standing. It is now numbered 74 (or 67) Talbot Street. He also passed much of his boyhood in a third house built by his father, Moatfield, just outside the village of Coolock, where there is a moat on the lawn. Fitzpatrick describes Moatfield as situated in the Green Lanes of Clontarf, from which it is quite a long way off. The Green Lanes are introduced, however, into some of Lever’s novels. James Lever built and owned other houses in Mabbot Street and Montgomery Street, and left them to his two sons, Charles and the Rev. John Lever, who was the senior of the novelist by ten years. The deterioration of this property began in Charles Lever’s lifetime and caused him much annoyance. Spencer’s Row, off Talbot Street, is apparently called after that John Spencer who was Charles Lever’s early friend and correspondent.

The southern portion of Lower Gardiner Street appears in Rocque’s Map, 1756, as The Old Rope Walk. Mabbot Street, parallel to it, is much older. It is called after Gilbert Mabbot, who erected a water-mill here before 1674. It must be remembered that this was then the seashore, and a map of this coast in 1717 marks a “corner of Mabbot Wall,” once the sea-wail. Mabbot’s mill, mill-pond and land extended back from the present Talbot Street to the road which is now Montgomery Street. This picturesque idea of the antecedents of Mabbot Street, is even surpassed by that of Montgomery Street, which was such a remote and rural district to the citizens of Dublin, that it was called World’s End Lane. An elder daughter of Sir William Montgomery, Bart., married Luke Gardiner, Lord Mountjoy; but a younger, from whom this street was named Montgomery Street in 1776, married John Beresford who was so active in developing this district. It has recently been improved and renamed Foley Street after the great sculptor, who was born in No.6 Montgomery Street in 1818.( Amongst other distinguished men born on the north side of Dublin, may be mentioned John O’Keeffe, the dramatist, born in Abbey Street, William Mossop, the medallist, Dion Boucicoult, the dramatist in North Earl Street, and Joseph Sheridan Lefanu the novelist, at 52 Lower Dominick Street.)

Cumberland Street dates from 1766 and Gloucester Street from about ten years later. The first is from the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II., stingingly referred to in Thackeray’s Virginians as the Duke of Culloden and Fontenoy. The second is from the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III. The houses in both, and especially in Upper Gloucester Street, are very fine. In the latter street two great Irish judicial dignitaries, one of whom is a peer, were born in 1837 at Nos. 5 and 29.

Lady Anne’s Lane is off Cumberland Street. Gloucester Diamond and Gloucester Terrace in Gloucester Street are architectural embellishments of this once fine street. The toy street off it, called Mulgrave Place, bears date 1835, when the popular Earl of Mulgrave (Marquess of Normanby) was Viceroy.

In the first half of the last century the Kane family resided in Gloucester Street. They were manufacturing chemists with an extensive concern on the North Wall. Sir Robert Kane, author of The Industrial Resources of Ireland, made many discoveries in chemistry. His son, Captain, since then Admiral, Kane, became famous for his rescue, by skilful seamanship, of his ship the Calliope in the great hurricane at Samoa on the 16th of March, 1889, when all the other warships present-three German and three American perished. Many other members of the Kane family, some still living, have been distinguished in various walks of life.

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