Roaring Trade: On the highs and (occasionally fatal) lows of Dublin’s lion business

Because it’s part of my neighbourhood – within even last year’s 2km Covid lockdown zone – I tend to take Dublin Zoo for granted. I pass it, running or walking, several days a week, and often without noticing. But occasionally the roar of a big cat will remind me to appreciate my remarkable neighbours, and to admire also the sturdiness of the fences that separate them from us.

The zoo’s lions have not always been confined to their Phoenix Park quarters. Although it had nothing to do with deficiencies in fencing on one occasion, the results were fatal for at least one Dubliner. But we’ll return to that story later.

Now home to bats and birds, the zoo's old lion house is named after Lord Roberts, aka "Roberts of Kandahar", an Anglo-Irish officer who rose to be commander-in-chief of the British army in the last years of Queen Victoria.

Roberts’s long army career did more than most to ensure the success of another kind of lion, the symbolic imperial one, whose roar was heard all over the world at the time. But he loved actual animals too, hence the zoo connection. Hence also the grave of his horse in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where it is buried under a headstone more elaborate than those given to many of the soldiers who died there.

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When the sun set on this part of Roberts’s empire a few years later, the zoo facility named for him remained.

Indeed, it may have achieved its greatest glory in the early years of independence, during which a Dublin-born lion reputedly became the first of the famous Metro Goldwyn Mayer mascots, albeit in a non-roaring role, since the films were still silent then.

The animal was called Cairbre here, a name fit for a king, and a high king at that. But typically, success in Hollywood came at some cost to his dignity: Americans renamed him “Slats”.

Dublin Zoo was a prolific breeder of lions at one time, helped by such local dietary refinements as “boiled potatoes and medicinal doses of whiskey punch”.

Another innovation, in a case recorded by the Spectator magazine, was the use of a “very beautiful Irish red setter” as the wet-nurse of cubs that had been rejected by their mother.

But as it was for Ireland generally, the early 1950s was a low point for Dublin's lion community. The sorry saga that unfolded then is a sub-plot in Peter Sirr's new book Intimate City, which we mentioned here last week. It began with the arrival from Belgium of a lion named Albert, who was introduced to a popular local lioness called Flame, and promptly killed her.

Albert thus disqualified himself from a career in the zoo, but this being the 1950s, he was instead given a transfer to Fossett's Circus, then stationed at its winter quarters in Dunsoghly, near Finglas, where the renowned tamer Bill Stephens renamed him Pasha.

Unfortunately, while in the cage with him there one day in January 1953, and as the zoo’s superintendent, CS Webb, and other guests looked on in horror, Stephens somehow slipped and was pounced on by the rogue lion.

As Sirr writes: “Webb raced to the cage, grabbed a pole and managed to beat the lion off and haul Stephens out, but the badly-mauled lion tamer was dead before he reached Richmond Hospital.”

This was not the first time Stephens had been attacked. It had happened at least twice before, during a show in the city's Olympia Theatre and in Limerick. Nor was he the only Dubliner mauled that winter.

Two months earlier, another lioness had escaped from its circus compound in Fairview and attacked a garage attendant during a 30-minute tour of the northside suburb.

One of the other two lions in the cage with Stephens on the fatal day had also experienced free-range life for a brief period. During yet another escape that winter, at Finglas, it had killed three pigs before being recaptured. Luckily for Webb, it did not join forces with Pasha on that day in the cage.

Having earned a reprieve after his earlier misdeeds, the latter had now run out of chances. He remained on death row at Dunsoghly farm for several days, where his fate rested in the hands of Stephen’s widow. But a short item in The Irish Times in February reported that he had been “shot in the yard of the Police Barracks” at Finglas. The other three lions involved in the various incidents had been removed, meanwhile, to the higher-security facility of Dublin Zoo.