HEALING AT HEART
Temple Street’s intrinsic role in our history
Temple Street Children’s Hospital An Illustrated History
Barry Kennerk
New Island €25
As a small child I possessed the most terrible stammer. Having a stammer felt, at times, like being locked in an invisible cage. In the 1960s a stammer marked you out, and, in an overcrowded classroom of rowdy boys, it marked me out as a perceived dunce. Because my mother died when I was 10 years old, I do not retain a huge bank of memories of her, but the strongest memories that I still have are of holding her hand as we walked together beneath the archway that led from Gardiner Place into Nerney’s Court. Behind us, washing hung from the windows of crumbling Georgian buildings; to our right, a blacksmith shod a horse at a tiny forge and in front of us a door led into the speech therapy unit of Temple Street Children’s Hospital, to which she brought me for weekly appointments.
I still vividly recall every detail of that building because it was my first experience of the disconcerting corridors and waiting rooms that exist within hospitals. It has been an integral part of the life of the capital since it first opened its doors on that site in 1879, with just 21 beds at the time. In the intervening 135 years the hospital has perpetually expanded, spreading into adjoining buildings and opening outposts on adjacent streets as it provided state-of-the-art care within the confined infrastructure of the Georgian rooms at its core.
Its doors will finally close when the long-promised and eternally delayed National Children’s Hospital opens. But the story of Temple Street Hospital has always been about more than location – it is about the experiences of generations of staff and patients interacting there. Before all these stories are lost Dr Barry Kennerk (Temple Street’s resident historian and archivist) has brought them together in this fascinating history of a Dublin institution.
As a child I never thought about the lives of the young nurses I saw in its corridors, but now I realise they shared one rule in common with the privileged spectators who throng to Augusta Golf Club for the US Masters. This strictly enforced rule is summed up by 82-year-old Annie Bernadette Funge who started on the hospital staff as a young probationer in 1949: ‘Only run in case of fire or haemorrhage.’ Running (or even talking) was as forbidden there as it still is at Augusta. However, there was nothing privileged about life for a trainee nurse in the mid-20th century.
Each year in the 1940s 30 probationers entered Temple Street for preliminary training and roughly two thirds went on to pass their final exams and qualify as nurses. Living conditions were grim. Thomasina Mackey remembers the only heat in winter came from a single fire, with turf so damp that ‘you spent your two hours leisure time in an often vain endeavour to light it, or else you retired, defeated, to your bed – not with a hot water bottle – you were still not allowed to boil a kettle in the nurses’ home in those days’.
Young girls, no matter how studious, are inventive when it comes to fun and Teresa Collins recalls how trainee nurses in her block – divided from the main hospital by a garden – could sometimes invite young gardaí in for coffee and steal their hats before throwing them down to them from the balcony – safe in the knowledge that the night sister needed to phone over for the gate to be unlocked before she made her rounds.
For patients life wasn’t always so much fun. Veronica Healy, aged 88, (one of more than 40 people interviewed by Kennerk) recalls being discharged at the age of 11, after three months in hospital with rheumatic fever in 1936. She was so weak that she was unable to walk and her mother pushed her all the way home to Cabra in a push-cart. That trip was at least shorter than the wartime train journeys of children from the country that could last for seven hours, on draughty trains fuelled by damp turf. Transport was so difficult that often parents couldn’t visit and deep bonds were forged between the young patients and the nurses.
But World War II was not the
only conflict that Temple Street was affected by. During the Easter Rising eight children were admitted with gunshot wounds. During the War of Independence the Mother Superior, Mother Polycarp, actively gave support and shelter to members of the IRA and Cumann na m Ban. She was rumoured to have even helped Éamon de Valera to disguise himself as a nun and allowed Cathal Brugha to take refuge in the hospital boiler house.
Although affected by such events, Temple Street was so embedded in the working class community surrounding it that most of the skirmishes it patched up involved children from the flats who wandered in so casually after falls that their mothers would not even know they were there until they arrived home bandaged. In addition to its battles against disease and illness, the hospital fought to alleviate the terrible poverty around it, with food tickets handed out to families every day and clothing and other essentials provided from whatever limited funds became available.
This highly readable book is not just the story of one hospital but an interwoven tapestry of the numerous stories of staff and patients who crowded into that space over the past century. Thousands of Dubliners, who still remember being brought there as children, are part of that ongoing history.