A SECRET HISTORY OF HOUSES:Delving 100 years back into the history of her house on Arklow Street in Dublin's Stoneybatter, Fiona McCannlearns about the English cavalrymen who once lived in the area
EVERY taxi driver in Dublin knows a thing or two about Stoneybatter, or so it seems each time I offer up my home address from the back seat.
Ah, the Batter. Did I know that this warren of houses behind Manor Street represents the most dense housing stock in Dublin? Did I know that the poet Austin Clarke lived just around the corner, on said Manor Street? Did I know that the expression “to go on the Batter” originated in this very north Dublin enclave, when the road was a thoroughfare to Tara and lined with drinking establishments to help travellers on their way?
Truth is, I didn’t know much about this part of Dublin 7 when my sister and I bought our house on Arklow Street at the turn of the century. We didn’t need to: it was close to the city centre, tucked up beside Phoenix Park, and had a couple of my friends already in residence. But in the decade I’ve been living there (and not living there – I’ve a habit of skipping out and coming back), my knowledge of the neighbourhood has slowly grown, thanks to some longer-term residents, loquacious taxi drivers, and, recently, the publication of the Dublin censuses of 1901 and 1911.
What I had already gleaned before the census was published was that my Arklow Street home dates from the late 19th or very early 20th century, when it was built by the Dublin Artisan Dwellings Company.
Given that the tenement system had been recognised as a serious contributor to the mortality rate among Dublin’s poor, a new act in Britain had been extended to Ireland that authorised for loans to be made to private bodies for the erection of working-class houses in highly populated areas.
The Dublin Artisan Dwellings Company was one such private body, established in 1876 by a group of investors that included the Guinness family. It was set up not as a favour to Dubliners living in appalling conditions, but as a profit-making enterprise, which often meant rents were not particularly low in these artisan dwellings, which over the late 19th and early 20th century were built all over Dublin.
All this information had somewhat dented my original assumption that due to the size of the house – it’s still barely large enough to swing my sister in, but was even smaller when it was built – the original occupants must have been a teeming family of financially challenged Dubliners. I imagined my ancestral housemates as hardscrabble types.
It turns out that most of those early residents were better off than that. They had to have decent and regular incomes in order to live there in the first place.
The Stoneybatter houses stretched from Arbour Hill up to the North Circular Road – a huge building site over the 10 or so years of their construction – and in the early 20th century, the area came to be called “the buildings” by locals, a nickname it carried for generations afterwards.
Each house was also fitted with a bootscraper – a metal fixture that remains on the outside wall at the dividing line between each of the houses. These were partly responsible for my imagining the early Stoneybatterites as manual labourers. It turns out, though, that the bootscrapers tell a different story. One hundred years ago, the residents shared their streets with livestock, which trundled regularly through the streets on market days and left their legacy along the roads and footpaths.
So who lived in my house? In 1901, according to the census, what are likely to have been the first residents of No 31 Arklow Street were a family of five. The Wells family were all born in England and were members of the Church of England, with the “head of the family”, Henry CO Wells, listed as a soldier with the 21st Lancers. This was a cavalry regiment that fought in India and later, in 1898, in Sudan, at the decisive Battle of Omdurman. Winston Churchill was once a member of the same regiment, though he was not among those who were subsequently relocated to Dublin and trotted out to greet Queen Victoria on her 1900 visit to the city.
Henry Wells may have ended up on Arklow Street because of its proximity to what is now Collins Barracks, but was then Royal Barracks. He lived with his wife, Josephine Rose, and their three children, Charles Walker (then 10), Florence Mabel (seven) and Josephine Rose (six).
Henry Wells wasn’t the only member of the 21st Lancers to find himself on Arklow Street: just two doors away were the Seabrooks, where the head of the household, Alfred, is listed as a sergeant with the same regiment, his two children having been born in India and Egypt.
Frederick Sawkins in No 37 and Frank Stauder in No 41 were also English-born members of the 21st Lancers, which makes Arklow Street in 1901 a kind of enclave of British cavalrymen and their families.
Yet according to the 1911 census, the 21st Lancers didn’t stay long. Ten years on, the Wells were gone from No 31, replaced by James Pearman, a corporal with the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, his wife Mary, a dressmaker, and their infant son Herbert. The Seabrooks and Sawkins had also moved on, their homes now also occupied by members of the Royal Irish Lancers.
So what became of the Wells, the family of five who shared the street with a Scottish butcher and a bread van driver, among others? After their time in what was then a four-roomed house, it’s hard to find a trace of them. They may well have been moved on with the regiment.
The 21st Lancers were deployed to India in 1912, and drafts of men from the regiment formed a Service Squadron that fought on the Western Front during the first World War.
A quick search at the National Archives revealed nothing more of this family, nor did Google yield much of the fate of Henry Wells. The only possible lead turns out to be the grave of a Florence Mabel Wells, who not only has the same name but was also born around the same time as the former occupant of my house. This Florence Mabel Wells, who went on to marry and have children of her own, died in Quebec, Canada almost 40 years later. Whether or not she’s connected to the Wellses who once cooked in my kitchen, and slept – in somewhat cramped circumstances, I can only assume – in what is now my sister’s bedroom, would require the work of a historian or archivist.
So, it seems that Stoneybatter was a more cosmopolitan place 100 ago than I had imagined, and that its residents came and went, as they still do. Evidence of their time here has long been covered in new coats of paint and wallpaper, and no Wells children doodles appear even when the layers are peeled back.
There are no carved initials from Florence Mabel or Charles Walker in the cracks between the floorboards. Suddenly conscious of how a house and home can forget you, I scrabble for a penknife.
