A house filled with history
Once a lavish home, then a huge tenement, the restoration of 14 Henrietta Street has provided us with a door into Ireland’s past
IN APRIL 1911, the dwellers in No.14 Henrietta Street in north inner city Dublin sat down to fill out their census forms. Finding peace and quiet to concentrate on the beautiful cursive penmanship in entries that survive to this day must have been difficult, because by the time the completed forms were tallied, an astonishing fact emerged.
In this one house, a four-storey, over-basement property on a decaying terrace fronting on to a cobblestone street, 100 people — men, women and children — went about their daily lives.
Built in the era of Georgian grandeur when Dublin was the second city of the British Empire, No.14 was one of hundreds of tenements
The only blanket was their father’s greatcoat
spread across what were described as the worst slums in Europe. Entire families shared one room, and as many as 14 children shared two single beds, sleeping side to side rather than top to bottom to maximise the available space. The only ‘blanket’ available often was the greatcoat their father wore to his manual labour job; the savvy among the children learned to put an arm into one of the sleeves so the others couldn’t pull it away.
Walking through the house today, which now operates as perhaps the most fascinating museum in the city, it is easy to imagine the dreadful conditions they endured — the cold, the damp, the malnutrition, the diseases that spread so easily in such claustrophobic proximity.
It is easy too, though, to cast your mind back to the day the house was built, for an altogether wealthier family with none of those concerns. It was constructed in the 1740s by Luke Gardiner, who gave his name to another street that would suffer a similar fall from grace. No.14 originally was the home of the Right Honourable Richard, the third Lord Viscount
Molesworth, a field marshal who fought at the Battle of Blenheim and served as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Marlborough, and later as commander-in-chief of the Royal Irish Army.
Following the death of his first wife, Jane Lucas, with whom he had three daughters, Richard married Mary Jenney Ussher, daughter of the Archdeacon of Clonfert, in 1744. The house was spectacular, known for lavish balls and parties in an era of excess. As one contemporary wrote: ‘Nothing can be so gay as Dublin is — the Castle twice a week, the opera twice a week, with plays, assemblies and suppers to fill up the time.’
A visiting Frenchman, Le Chevalier de la Tocnaye, wrote of home entertaining in the city at the time, noting that ‘from vestibule to garret, the rooms were filled with fine ladies beautifully dressed, but so crushed against each other that it was barely possible to move’.
Most of these soirées took place on the first floor, up the grand staircase. Known as the piano nobile, or noble floor, it had walnut and mahogany furniture, the finest of damask wall coverings, intricate coving and cornicework, ceiling roses and rugs imported from Turkey. The oak floorboards were imported from the Baltic, where the trees grew tall enough to make long, sturdy individual planks; some still survive in the house.
In the basement were the kitchens. The ground floor was for family use, including the parlour, a rear dining room, and the master’s bedroom, while the upper floors had family bedrooms, with quarters for the servants in the attic.
One room was used for when Mary was pregnant. Since no woman of her standing was allowed be seen with a visible bump in public, she was isolated here — hence the term ‘confinement’ — during the later stages of all seven of her known pregnancies, giving birth to one boy and six girls.
To the rear of the house were stables for the horses, and to the front was a three-room brick cellar for storing food and wine. Visitors to the street today often complain about the unlovely bollards placed along two-thirds of its length, but
they serve a practical purpose. If cars were parked there, the weight might cause the ceilings of the cellars to collapse.
This gilded age did not last long, though. The 1801 Act of Union saw the Anglo-Irish gentry abandon the city when its political and administrative functions moved to Regency London. The surviving middle-classes moved into the street, mainly lawyers attracted by the adjacent King’s Inns, built at the top of Henrietta Street.
Designed by James Gandon, who also was responsible for the Custom House, the Four Courts and O’Connell Bridge, the foundation stone was laid in 1800.
From 1850 to 1860, the house was the headquarters of the Encumbered Estates Court, which acquired and sold insolvent estates after the Great Famine, an event that would further shape the life of No.14.
After some years as a workplace
One in five children would not see their fifth birthday
for barristers and law clerks, and occupation by the Dublin Militia, the house was bought in 1976 by Thomas Vance, who converted it into 19 flats, which were furnished to a high standard.
In 1877, these were advertised in the Irish Times: ‘To be let to respectable families in a large house, Northside, recently papered, painted and filled up with every modern sanitary improvement, gas and WC on landings, Vartry Water, drying yard and a range with oven for each tenant; a large coachhouse, or workshop with apartments, to be let at the rere. Apply to the caretaker, 14 Henrietta St.’
The Famine led to massive social change, though. Workers drifted away from the land, migrating to the cities in search of industrial work, labouring, or services; the population of Dublin grew by 36,000, or one-tenth, in the second half of the 19th century. The 1911 census records milliners, a dressmaker, French polishers and bookbinders living in No.14.
Others worked at the nearby Williams and Woods factory, making confectionery, canned goods, vinegar, and preserves. The crates that brought fruit to make the jams served other functions. Many workers brought them home for use as makeshift chairs, but they also became makeshift coffins for children who died, at a time when one in five would not see his or her fifth birthday.
It is not a surprise given the living conditions. In 1911, 850 people lived on Henrietta Street. Front doors of the houses largely were removed, so as well as those in the sub-divided flats, the hall and stairways were also often used by the homeless looking for a night’s shelter. Flats that once were one big room were partitioned to head height, but still were large spaces to heat. The fancy WCs installed by Vance were long gone, and sanitation consisted of a shared outside toilet, and bedpans that had to be emptied morning and night.
In total, a full quarter of Dublin’s citizens lived in one-room tenements. As James Connolly wrote: ‘Is it not strange to find that Dublin, a city famous for its charitable institutions and its charitable citizens, should also be infamous for the perfectly hellish conditions under which its people are housed.’
One former resident of No.14, Rosie Hackett, became a militant trade unionist and Irish Citizen Army volunteer fighting for better working and living conditions, and the new Luas bridge between O’Connell and Butt bridges was named for her in 2014.
The collapse, with attendant fatalities, of several buildings around the city, due to neglect that allowed water ingress and dry rot to weaken the structures — most had timber frames with brick infill — led to a commission to clear the slums. Interrupted by the First World War, the Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, this work finally began in earnest in the early 1930s under chief architect Herbert Simms.
Vast new suburbs were built, in Donnycarney, Crumlin and Ballyfermot, but not everyone was happy. Brendan Behan’s mother Kathleen complained that her furniture would not fit in the new house, and it is claimed she didn’t venture upstairs for a week after moving in because she didn’t realised she owned the upper floor too.
Others complained that the fresh air in the new suburbs was giving children such voracious appetites they were being eaten out of house and home.
The last resident of No.14 moved out in 1979, after living there for over 40 years, though in better conditions than those who had gone before her. Nonetheless, despite having a gas cooker, she preferred to use the open fire.
A Georgian preservation group bought the house and planned to fully restore it, but the funding never materialised. Instead, Dublin City Council began the process of buying it in 2000, with a view to preserving it in all its many roles over the centuries.
Craftspeople restored much of the grandeur of the hall and the piano nobile, where the Molesworths once entertained the upper echelons of a society that signed its own death warrant the day it signed the Act of Union, but they also set about preserving the parts of the house that saw squalor too.
Reckitt’s blue, a sort of disinfectant paint, is visible throughout, with red Raddle below. Many a
Women used the wall paint as rouge or lipstick
woman heading out on a date licked a finger, removed some of the red, and applied it as rouge or lipstick.
Restoration took ten years, and No.14 opened to the public in 2018. Some of the visitors were actually born in the house, while others are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who lived there. They have shared their stories, and many artefacts, to add to the authenticity of the experience, a journey through 276 years of life in Dublin, reflecting its gaiety and its grim realities equally in the most fascinating, and heartbreaking, way. O 14 HENRIETTA Street is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am-4pm, by guided tour only, starting on each hour. Prices are €10 (adults), €8 (over-60s and students), €5 (child 5+), and free for underfives. The house is fully accessible, with lift access. Booking is recommended, on info@14henrietta street.ie, or (01) 524 0383.