Charles Stewart Parnell

Portobello

We have been spending a little time over on the east side of the country, not too far from Dublin. We like exploring, and the built-up areas have much to offer in terms of history so I’m returning – for a brief moment – to one of my favourite subjects: the canals of Ireland. You may remember my forays back in 2016 to seek out the journeys taken by L T C Rolt seventy years before that, and recorded in his classic book Green & Silver. You can find all those posts here. Earlier this year I added a further post to the series, examining in greater detail the meeting of the waters of Grand and Royal Canals, within Dublin. Today I’m simply concentrating mainly on one place, to the south of the city: Portobello.

This wonderfully drawn map (the two extracts above) dates from 1797, and was complied by William Faden (1749-1836) and Samuel John Neele (1758-1824): it was published in London and Dublin. You can see from it that the Grand Canal at that time virtually created the southern boundary of the city, with the canal basin at Portobello being a significant location to serve the growing conurbation south of the River Liffey.

This extract from the 6″ first edition of the Ordnance Survey shows Portobello Harbour with its significant warehouses, the ‘City Basin’ and a lock and bridge – known as La Touche Bridge. We have encountered the La Touche family in an earlier post – Glen of the Downs – and learned there that the family had built a big house – ‘Bellevue’ – on their estates near Greystones and Delgany.

The bridge (photo courtesy of excellentstreetimages.com) was named after William Digges La Touche (1747–1803), a director of the Grand Canal Company. The waterway was, of course, an important business venture in its heyday, contributing to the prosperity of the city merchants. Prior to its construction the area was farmland, and the name Portobello is said (curiously) to have come from the Irish Cuan Aoibhinn, meaning ‘beautiful harbour’. Note the ‘City Basin’ marked on the OS map: this was used from 1812 to provide a drinking water reservoir for the south side of the city. In the 1860s the water was found to contain a high concentration of sulphuric acid, and this source was eventually superseded by the new reservoir at Dartry, in Co Wicklow.

This is a fine early print of the Harbour, showing the Grand Canal Hotel designed by James Colbourne and opened in 1797. In the foreground is a passenger or ‘packet’ boat. We might forget how important the transport of people was in the early days of canal transport, before the advent of railways (see Trollope’s account in my post here): roads were often in a poor state and the boats provided a smooth – if not exactly speedy – way of getting about.

…the company’s hotels were simply the posting houses of this water-road …There was considerable interchange of passenger as well as goods traffic at Shannon Harbour. Travellers changed here from the Dublin passage boats into Bianconi’s ‘long cars’ which operated between Birr, Shannon Harbour and Athlone in connection with the boats. Alternatively they might board the paddle steamers The Lady Lansdowne or The Lady Burgoyne which plied between Killaloe pier head and Athlone, calling at a jetty on the river near the mouth of the canal. Smaller craft sailed from Killaloe pier head to the transatlantic port of Limerick, and so the Grand Canal became a link in the route between Dublin and America…

L T C ROLT, Green & Silver, 1949

The hotel at Portobello was one of five constructed along the length of the Grand Canal: all were fine buildings – probably state-of-the-art in terms of accommodation for travellers by water. You will find a post which I wrote about them here. On the header picture is a view of a packet boat at Harcourt Lock, and you can see a stage-coach there waiting to transfer passengers. The Portobello hotel closed in 1835 but the building has survived to the present day through many incarnations.

This is a great photo if you are a transport history enthusiast! It must date from the 1940s, as the Dublin tram system declined at that time, the last one in the city being phased out on 9 July 1949. The bridge and former canal hotel are clearly seen.

Portobello House – the canal hotel in the 1960s. Some fine classic cars in this picture! At this time it was a nursing home: one of its elderly residents was Jack B Yeats, the celebrated Irish painter who currently has a major exhibition in the National Gallery.

The former canal hotel was completely refurbished in 1972 (the photograph above dates from that year) and survives today – in good order – as a private educational establishment. Here it is again (below), as you’ve never seen it before – through the eagle-eye of Google Earth!

I can’t resist finishing with this plate from from The Graphic, a British weekly newspaper set up to rival the popular Illustrated London News. Published on May 13, 1882, this shows “. . . the lighting of tar-barrels in Portobello Harbour, on the Grand Canal in Dublin, to celebrate the release from prison of Charles Stewart Parnell and two colleagues . . .”

Parnell, Home Rule and Tom Merry

From 1883 to 1892 in Britain, a periodical called St Stephen’s Review was one of the many journals that catered to a conservative (and Conservative) view of the Empire – a Unionist, Loyalist position that saw anything that threatened the social and political order as anathema to the best interests of Britain. Magazines like this employed cartoonists to illustrate their pages and encouraged them to be as savage as they liked. One of the masters of the genre was William Mecham who took the professional name of Tom Merry, and in each issue he provided a political cartoon commenting on the times. Each one was as superbly drawn as it was vicious and as pointed as it was unsubtle.

In this one, designed to appeal to Unionists, Lord Randolph Churchill is depicted as King William of Orange trampling the Home Rulers. Merry’s portraiture was outstanding (that’s Churchill below) and his readership would have instantly understood who his subjects were.

In order to place these cartoons in their historical context, a little Irish history is called for, so what follows is a brief and necessarily over-simplistic outline of what Tom Merry was responding to in his cartoons.

During this period the British Parliament was obsessed with The Irish Question. According to historian Conor Mulvagh, “The rise of Charles Stewart Parnell within the Irish Parliamentary Party of the late 1870s ran parallel to a rapidly evolving agrarian crisis.”* In fact, three overlapping and often conflicting strains of Irish activism run through the 1880s. The first is that of national self-government through constitutional means – Home Rule – the goal of the Irish Parliamentary Party led by Parnell.

Gladstone, depicted by Merry always as the main threat to stability and Empire, hangs by a thread because of his dependence on the Irish vote

The second strain is that of land reform and this was a period of significant agrarian action led by Michael Davitt and the Land League. After spending much of his youth involved in the IRB, Davitt had become an advocate of non-violent agitation and civil disobedience and used these techniques to great effect in the Land League (see Robert’s post on Michael Davitt). Despite the emphasis on peaceful protest, clashes and skirmishes did occur, including the Mitchellstown Massacre in 1887.

In case the message wasn’t clear enough, Merry would add labels. Erin is sporting Plan of Campaign (more about that next time) and Murder, while a potion bottle on her table has the word Dynamite on it. The discarded clothes are Law and Order, Rights of Property and British Rule

William Ewart Gladstone by Millais, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

The third strain was represented by the Fenians – Irish revolutionaries who had staged an unsuccessful uprising in 1867 and many of whom were living in exile in the United States. In the 1880s, orchestrated by O’Donovan Rossa from his base in New York, the Fenians carried out their Dynamite Campaign in England, causing injuries, deaths, and real terror (see my post, O’Donovan Rossa – The First Terrorist?, for more about the Fenians’ operations on Britain). While the Fenian Dynamite Campaign was condemned by the Irish Parliamentary Party and by Davitt’s Land League, both of whom saw it as undermining their objectives, it had an enormous impact in Britain, hardening sympathies against the Irish.

Gladstone and Parnell leap into the void together

The causes of constitutional and agrarian reform, however, found much common ground and the Parliamentary Party and the Land League, Parnell and Davitt, eventually entered an alliance known as the New Departure. “For Parnell, the New Departure offered the alluring prospect of hitching the the rather abstract concept of Home Rule and national Self-Government to the more emotive, popular and established political cause of the land.”*

Parnell, looking stressed, plays chess against a confident William Henry Smith. Smith (that’s him below) was the original book seller who founded the modern chain that bears his name. A member of the Conservative party, at one point he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. Each of the chess pieces is labelled. Can you recognise Victoria?

The British Parliament was in essence a two-party system by the 1880s – Liberals represented fiscally progressive and socially liberal ideals, while Conservatives represented pride in Empire and loyalty to monarchy and tradition. Elected parliamentarians from Ireland from the Unionist tradition aligned with the Conservatives, whereas Parnell’s nationalists supported Gladstone’s Liberals on a quid pro quo basis.

W H Smith courtesy if the National Portrait Gallery

Given the Conservative politics of the St Stephen’s Review, Tom Merry’s cartoons cast Parnell and Gladstone as villains. The cartoons often feature shadowy Irishmen in the background, masked and carrying dynamite. Although his Irish caricatures were not as outrageously simian in their features as those of the infamous Punch cartoons, they are often shown as drunken and thuggish.

Two sailors wearing HMS Union hats are bing tempted to join the other side

This post will serve as a brief introduction to Tom Merry’s cartoons on The Irish Question. In a subsequent post I will include examples with more Irish politicians who played a leading role in the great events of the times. I will leave you with one of my favourite Merry Cartoons below – every nation, it seems, loves Victoria and being part of her Empire, except the ‘scapegrace’ Irish man, skulking away with his dynamite, his gun, and his shillelagh.

 

Many thanks to John Lubbock and to Wellcome Images who have made these cartoons freely available on Wikimedia Commons so that they can be used under the Creative Commons license.
*’Home Rulers at Westminster’ by Conor Mulvagh, The Cambridge History of Ireland Vol IV, 2018