THE PEELER’S NOTEBOOK

A Peeler patrols the foggy streets of Dublin. KEEPING THEM PEELED

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.

“ I 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

to write about the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), or Peelers as they were commonly known, after Sir Robert Peel, who had founded the modern police force in London.

The story of Shadow of the Brotherhood was of two police constables, Patrick Keena and Sergeant Stephen Kelly, who were shot on duty in 1867 by a Fenian on his way to murder a witness held at the Crown Witness Depot in Chancery Lane. They were taken to Mercer’s Hospital where they were “subjected to horrific treatment by today’s standards,” as Barry says.

“I was hugely interested in this because Mercer’s would have been known back in the day as the DMP man’s hospital. Keena succumbed to his injuries, but Kelly was held down by two medical orderlies, and the surgeon felt for the location of the bullet by touch. When they pulled it out, the bullet was marked with the letters ‘Po’ from where it had hit his tunic button with the word ‘Police’ on it. Those kinds of stories are fascinating to me, because of the curious details, and working on my thesis and being interested in the Fenian era, you can’t come to that but through police files. The Fenians didn’t really tend to leave records.” RESEARCH As a result, he has spent countless hours at the National Archives over the years, “poring over Dublin Castle reports in that very distinctive blue paper,” the result of which is a deep knowledge of the people involved in policing at this turbulent time.

“You get a sense of who these people were,” Barry tells me, “and while I was looking at these papers, I started to notice a lot of quirky little details about the DMP that weren’t recorded anywhere else, and which I didn’t have room for in my thesis. For instance, that you could get arrested for flying a kite, or throwing snowballs, or how the police dealt with rabid dogs. I accumulated all of these pieces of information and found that they would work really well under an umbrella project, and that became The Peeler’s Notebook.”

In compiling all of this information, painstaking research was necessary. “Archives by their nature are quite bitty and incomplete, and as much as you are hoping that police reports will give you the complete picture, often what you are relying on is a combination of those reports, newspaper accounts, secondary sources,” Barry says, “but I have tried to combine those approaches in my work to give a fuller picture.”

Those other sources include accounts by a range of characters, from street traders and constables, right up to Ned Broy, the Dublin Castle civil servant made famous in the Michael Collins film.

Research at times proved difficult and frustrating for Barry. “When I was researching the book, the first port of call was those Chief Secretary Office index books, and I started at 1836 and went right up to the 1880s, and then beyond that to the Lockout in 1913.

“One of the really frustrating things was that I found index references to the gallant attempt by a Constable Sheahan to save a group of sewer workers who had been overcome by gas – there is a monument to his memory at Burgh Quay – and there are lots of references with follow on numbers, but you could spend half an hour waiting for the archive staff to bring up a file, only to be told there was nothing there.”

Having said that, when previously untold stories come to light, there is a great sense of satisfaction for Barry. “One thing that was fantastic was the City Morgue book, because not only did I find information about Sheahan there, but also information about some of the workers who had been injured during the Lockouts. So, sometimes you find a set A depiction of the shooting of RIC Head Constable Thomas Talbot by a Fenian gunman.

Peelers tackling a rabid dog on the streets of Dublin.

of records or an index book that will cover several bases at once, and you walk away thinking that was a great success, but other times you come out empty handed.”

STRANGE TIMES The stilt versus tram race is just one of the many bizarre stories to come out of The Peeler’s Notebook, including an Apache attack on Parnell Square and a deer that was court-martialled, but Barry has a clear favourite.

“My favourite chapter to write was by far the one about how the police dealt with rabid dogs. I was fascinated by that subject, because over the years I have come across reference to that issue so many times. Dubliners at that time were terrified of rabies, and you just can’t imagine that today.

“Victorian times are in some ways familiar to us, because the police bureaucracy, the machinery of government, was very similar to today. All of that had its roots in Victorian Britain and Ireland. But because of that familiarity, we wrongly believe that if we were to suddenly be transported back to the streets of Victorian Dublin, we would be able to manage. There were so many very unusual and strange things that the average person of today would be very surprised with. The idea of dogs with rabies is one, and policemen going out from various police stations, armed with guns (most were only armed with

their truncheon) to dispatch rabid dogs, is incredible.” The climate of Dublin would also be a major jolt to someone transported back to Victorian Dublin, according to Barry, when every winter saw 60 days of thick fog descend on the city. “It was so bad that mail trucks would get lost on their way to the GPO, and that is hard to imagine,” he says.

That fog not only made policing the streets more difficult, it also had a detrimental effect on the Peelers who were exposed to the elements for long periods. “Those conditions that policemen worked in led to a lot of rheumatism and TB, and they had to lobby for the right to wear a beard as protection from the cold.”

On top of that was the violence that lurked in the fog and shadows, with garrotting gangs a particular danger. “Such was the frequency of garrotting attacks, people could actually buy anti-garrotte collars,” Barry tells me. “People in fear of being attacked could wear a steel collar, or a collar with spikes in it. Or they might have a glove with spikes on them, or if you were a gentleman, a sword cane. That kind of Dublin is so alien in comparison to today’s city.

“These stories give people a more realistic idea of Victorian times, not the sanitised version they might get from watching Sherlock Holmes on TV. Really, it was a bizarre time.”

DANGER All told, life for a Peeler in such turbulent times was dangerous. “When I was working on the Brotherhood book in 2010, something that occurred to me was that those two Peelers who were shot, they went out armed with only truncheons,” Barry tells me, “and throughout the history of the DMP, there were various flashpoints: the height of the Fenian troubles in the 1860s, the 1913 Lockout. At times, you get the sense that members of the DMP were under enormous stress. Aside from the normal vicissitudes of life as a Peeler, and the difficulties that brought, having to go out and run the gauntlet of gunmen on the streets was a big thing in the 1860s.”

To back this point up, Barry tells me of the tomb of a Constable Charles O’Neill in Glasnevin Cemetery, the first policeman in Ireland to be shot on duty. “He was shot in 1866 during the Fenian troubles, and his epitaph says he was assassinated – that’s a very political statement to make. When Keena died, there would have been a huge funeral cortege, hundreds of policemen, and with Constable Sinnott when he was blown up during the ‘dynamite wars’ in 1892, there was again a huge show of strength against the Fenians, to say ‘we are not to be intimidated’.

“I really got a sense of that again in 1913,” Barry adds. “From the records we can avail of today, you can find details of specific Policemen from their badge numbers, and you can see that some of them were involved in numerous stressful incidents – putting down riots, going into tenements to quell disturbances, 1916, dealing with looters after rioting. I would imagine that many of them were suffering from PTSD. If you were a Peeler between 1913 and 1922, you were exposed to things on the beat that you would not be exposed to as a Garda today.

“Of course, there is a huge drug and gangland problem today, but I think it is nothing compared to that ten-year period. The city was almost destroyed, hundreds of civilian and military casualties, riots on a regular basis.”

Apart from these flashpoints, the Peelers of Dublin were generally held in good esteem by the city’s population, Barry explains. “Although the 1913 Lockout was a turning point, before that, as much as any police force could ever be popular, they were fairly well regarded,” he says.

“Even after 1913, they didn’t lose their popularity, and what stands out for me is that even after we got independence in 1922, the DMP persisted into the early years of the Free State in a way that the Royal Irish Constabulary didn’t. The RIC, who policed the island apart from Dublin city, were reviled, looked on as doing the work of the British Crown (especially Head Constable Thomas Talbot, who was described as a “hog in armour” and was eventually shot by Fenians). DMP men, in contrast, were predominantly Catholic, were able to discuss the issues of the day such as Home Rule, and some of them were openly nationalist.”

Working on a compilation historical book to mark the 200th birthday of Ashbourne, where he now lives, Barry tells me of one contributor, Tóla Collier, who has written a fantastic piece about the Battle of Ashbourne in 1916, in which he remarks that the RIC men there were not only predominantly Protestant, they were also an armed force, both of which made them less popular than their DMP counterparts.

“You had a strange situation where you had a DMP man patrolling the beat in Rathmines, unarmed, and in Rathfarnham, not far away, you have a green uniformed RIC man patrolling with a rifle. So, it was a different kind of dynamic,” he says.

Not everyone saw the DMP in a good light though. “Being set upon when arresting a prisoner did happen,” Barry says. “There were also citizens of Dublin who did look on beating up policemen as the popular amusement of the day. So as much as we can wax lyrical about them being regarded in somewhat popular terms, it wasn’t always easy for them.”

Barry’s Moore Street history book will make its third print run in March, while he is looking towards the 200th anniversary of Temple Street Hospital and an expanded history to commemorate that, but for now, he can relish the stories he has brought together in such fine detail in The Peeler’s Notebook.

“When I was writing my PhD, I needed to pare back some of the detail of these stories, and it was a joy for me to be able to reinsert all the drama and detail of certain incidents,” he says. “The detail of the explosion that killed Constable Sinnott, for example, during the ‘dynamite wars’, when all the plate glass windows were blown out on Dame Street, and Madame Margotte, who ran a pet shop, waking up under a pile of glass, with her parrot saying ‘Oh Mama, what’s the matter?’ – to be able to find that detail in police reports and to share the story is very enjoyable.”