Bray and the 1918-1919 pandemic versus today
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF HAS BEEN DILIGENTLY TRAWLING THROUGH LOCAL COUNCIL MINUTES IN BRAY FROM THE YEARS 1918-1919, WHEN A DEADLY FLU VIRUS STALKED THE LAND, WHILE PHOTOGRAPHER LEIGH ANDERSON HAS CAPTURED SOME OF THE REFERENCES AS THEY LOOK TODAY.
NO- ONE with a sense of curiosity who has a computer and access to the internet has any cause to be bored during lockdown or cocooning. There is no reason to fall idle, not while Bray Town Commissioners and Urban District Minute Books 1857-1967 are available as a digitised collection. All you have to do is log on to www.wicklow.ie, drill down into the archive section of the site, and there they are.
Greystones historian Rosemary Raughter has been carrying out some valiant work, examining the influenza pandemic of 1918/1919 across County Wicklow. Such minutes are not her first port of call. The local authority record for that time reveals little or nothing of how the town fared in the face of the so-called Spanish flu.
Nevertheless, the handwritten accounts of the Urban District Council (UDC) do provide plenty of thought-provoking material from an era when the British hold on Ireland was being slowly loosened. Not that the minutes shed a great deal of light on such matters of national politics either. The councillors were more concerned with the issuing of taxi licences and determining the programme of entertainment on the sea-front.
There is a reek of old decency about these documents which may be detected even through the antiseptic medium of the computer screen.
At the council meeting of September 16, 1919 for instance, the chairman JM Magee had the initials JP after his name. Aha, JP - a justice of the peace. Of the dozen men (yes, of course all men) assembled around the table in the Town Hall, no less than three were JPs, with the chairman joined in that exalted status by M Langton and JW Reigh, alongside D Roantree – not a JP but an MD, a medical doctor.
The convention of giving initials rather than full names is used consistently throughout this archive in any mention of the elected members. The veil slipped only briefly as Frank Bichell (can that name be correct? – the writing is not clear) of Bray Head Hotel was co-opted to replace the late Thomas O’Carroll. During that meeting of September 16, these fellows with all their initials received a letter from Eileen O’Carroll.
She wrote from 114 Main Street with thanks on her own behalf, and on behalf of her brothers and sisters, for a recent expression of sympathy ‘in our recent sorrow’. Could the departed Councillor Thomas O’Carroll possibly have been a casualty of the influenza? It is impossible to know. There are likely to have been hundreds of flu victims in the greater Bray area around in 1918 and 1919 but it was not the council’s business to keep count or pass remarks. Instead, they granted John McElween a bar licence and they approved a £10 bonus to be paid to the Esplanade caretaker.
If the flu was more or less off the agenda, then so was bovine health, with confirmation from the powers that be that the council had no power to apply the tubercular test to cattle. The Department of Agriculture was a regular correspondent, and not only in relation to livestock. They were in touch too about construction of what the civil servants called a fish pass in the weir at Bray river, presumably meaning the Vartry.
This was all happening in the days before An
Garda Siochána were patrolling the streets of Bray and every other town in the 26 counties. Rather, it was the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) which was on the beat. Do not presume that they were totally pre-occupied with tracking down seditious republicans. In August of 1919, the council considered RIC correspondence regarding complaints about cycling in Albert Walk and the kicking of football on the Esplanade.
Like the Mounties, they got their man: a report from the barracks stated that one David Fairlie was found cycling on the Promenade. Whenever such blatantly anti-social behaviour was detected by the RIC, they did not have the power to prosecute. It was left to the politicians to take out a summons against the luckless Fairlie.
Public transport was an oft-repeated concern as the politicians had some say in the provision of taxi/hackney services. They granted one Michael Monks a hackney licence, also Richard Kenn(y?) of the Harbour Saloon, Missus M Cunningham, Mister Peter Cunningham and others.
The old UDC minutes do not go into detail on all aspects of the council’s work as much of the activity was delegated to be carried out by committees. There is reference, for instance, to an electric light committee, a special harbour committee, a technical instruction committee, advertising committee and a land-cultivation committee. The last mentioned was kept busy overseeing the fencing of allotments and the cultivation of a field at Kilruddery.
A public health committee was also on the books dealing with issues such as ‘ houses unfit for habitation’. We may speculate that the topic of influenza was referred to this public health committee. However, it was the full council which received a letter dated March 2, 1919, from Mother Rectress Ravenswell stating that she was unable to provide temporary hospital accommodation. Surely the flu pandemic was behind the requirement for extra bed space.
Around this time, the council viewed with alarm ‘recurrence and prevalence of epidemic influenza and septic pneumonia within the district.’ It was an emergency, so the Infectious
Disease (Notification) Act 1889 was invoked. This course of action was cited in the context of not only the flu, but also of pneumonia, measles, meningitis, et cetera. The length of the list makes the early 20th century sound scary.
The same batch of correspondence which featured Mother Rectress Ravenswell also included a request from a Mister Byrne, seeking use of the Town Hall for the annual railwaymen’s dance. The booking was accepted, as were similar reservations received from Missus Lynch of Cumann na mBan, from E Doyle of the Rahilly Sinn Féin Club, from W Webster of Comrades of the Great War, from the Associated Bible Stu
dents, from Miss Cecilia Poer as organiser of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, from Mister Lyons of St Kevin’s Burial Society, from Mister H Lyons of St Kevin’s Tontine Society and from Mister McDonnell of Bray Catholic Church Choir for various meetings or social functions. The clock at the Town Hall, by the way, required regular winding, a duty carried out by James Lesware under contract. This is known because Lesware made a successful application to have the value of the contract raised to five shillings per week. There is a hint that the council may have had horses, as a tender for harness from Mister R Foley was accepted, though without mention of precisely what such tack was needed for. sionally National intrude, politics as did when occa- a resolution arrived from the Naas Board of Guardians about the ill-treatment of political prisoners in Cork jail. The motion prompted a vote, which proved very close as the members divided 5 to 4 in favour of the motion, in March of 1919. The effects of World War One were still fresh and a group working to create a war memorial on Quinsboro Road was active. They sought to have the council take charge of the memorial – which is still in existence – once it had been completed.
Back in September of 1918, the council considered a resolution circulated by Sinn Féin, proposed by Cllr Mackey and Cllr Plunkett: ‘ That we, the Bray Urban District Council, protest against the extreme and inhuman sentence of two years’ hard labour passed on our fellow-countrymen particularly in the case of Mr P Murphy, a townsman, for asserting the right of free speech on August 15, 1918. Copy of this resolution to be sent to Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary for Ireland.’
The motion was passed but the suspicion lingers that the members may have been more at home fielding the letter from Mister Graham Kershaw, seeking permission to give open-air concerts on the Esplanade. Or in granting the Vincent de Paul permission to stage a swimming gala at the council baths for the ‘Deserving Poor of Bray’. Incidentally, the writing in the minutes appears unclear and impenetrable at first glimpse but, with a few scrawly exceptions, the script is actually quite legible. No doubt we have the steady hand of a man called John McConnell to thank for much of this. He was appointed clerk to the council in March of 1919 at a salary of £255 per year, with the prospect of a £52 annual bonus.
THE MAN WHO WOUND THE TOWN HALL CLOCK APPLIED TO HAVE THE VALUE OF HIS CONTRACT RAISED TO FIVE SHILLINGS PER WEEK