INTERVIEW
KEEPING THEM PEELED A Peeler patrols the foggy streets of Dublin.
Patrolling the streets of Victorian Dublin as a policeman was a difficult and dangerous job, as Barry Kennerk, author of The Peeler’s Notebook, explains to Adam Hyland.
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n Victorian times, there was just a complete disregard for health and safety. It was no holds barred, anything goes,” author Dr Barry Kennerk tells me. “So much so that a man, Rossini, could stand from a window out on to 20-foot stilts on Grafton Street and race a tram around St Stephen’s Green as an advertisement for his circus. He was winning until one of the circus horses jostled against his stilts and he fell. It seems like you could just do anything back then, judging by the weird and wonderful stories.”
Those weird and wonderful stories have been unearthed and compiled in The Peeler’s Notebook (reviewed later in this magazine), the fifth book from the Dublin historian, in which we discover that while these bizarre events made the streets of Dublin a colourful place, it also made them very difficult to police. Barry’s previous works include the acclaimed Moore Street: The Story of Dublin’s Market District, Shadow of the Brotherhood: The Temple Bar Shootings, The Railway House: Tales from an Irish Fireside, and Temple Street: Portrait of an Irish Children’s Hospital. As an archivist with Temple Street Hospital and part-time teacher in History and English, he has used his skills in finding hidden gems of social history to very good effect. Currently turning his PhD into a book about the British Secret Service and Fenianism in Ireland in the 1890s, he has used that and his previous works as a source and inspiration
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