To ask the CE on progress made on drawing down government funding to replace fallen and damaged trees in the city after Storm Ophelia? (Cllr Kieran McCarthy)
Missed one of Kieran McCarthy’s 50 columns of Our City, Our Town in the weekly Cork Independent in 2017 – all exploring the topical issues and challenges within Cork in 1917 – check them all out and more images at http://corkheritage.ie/?page_id=4649
Evening Echo is sited on old gasometer land gifted by Cork Gas Company to Cork City Council in the late 1980s, and subsequently dedicated as Shalom Park in 1989. The park sits in the centre of an old Cork neighbourhood known locally as ‘Jewtown.’ This neighbourhood is also home to the National Sculpture Factory. Not a specific commission, nor working to a curatorial brief, Evening Echo is a project generated as an artist’s response to the particularities of a place and has quietly gathered support from Cork Hebrew Congregation, Cork City Council, Bord Gáis and a local Cork newspaper, the Evening Echo.
References to the slow subsidence of the Jewish community in Cork have been present for years, but there is now a palpable sense of disappearance. Within the Cork Hebrew Congregation there are practical preparations underway for this, as yet unknown, future moment of cessation. Evening Echo moves through a series of thoughts and questions about what it might mean to be at this kind of cusp, both for the Jewish community and for other communities in Cork.
Evening Echo is manifested in a sequence of custom-built lamps, remote timing systems operated from Paris, a highly controlled sense of duration, a list of future dates, an annual announcement in Cork’s Evening Echo newspaper and a promissory agreement. Fleetingly activated on an annual cycle, and intended to exist in perpetuity, the project maintains a delicate position between optimism for its future existence and the possibility of its own discontinuance.
Maddie Leach’s work is largely project-based, site responsive and conceptually driven and addresses new thinking on art, sociality and place-based practices. She seeks viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to unique place-determined content and she is recognised for innovatively investigating ideas of audience spectatorship, expectation and participation in relation to art works. Leach’s projects include commissions for Iteration: Again (Tasmania, 2011), Close Encounters (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 2010), One Day Sculpture (2008), the New Zealand publication Speculation for the Venice Biennale 2007 and Trans Versa (The South Project, Chile, 2006).
The Wheels of 1917: Housing Crisis Solutions, 1917
In the first week of December 1917, Mr D J Coakley, Principal of the Cork School of Commerce, delivered a lecture entitled General Principles of Housing and Town Planning, with a specific focus on Cork. His public lecture was delivered with the Cork Municipal School of Commerce in the lecture theatre of the School of Art. Many of the challenges Mr Coakley spoke about are still relevant in today’s city.
In his lecture, D J Coakley outlined that from the reports or the Medical Superintendent Officer of Health, the Corporation of Cork had during the previous thirty years expended £81,200 in clearing unhealthy and dilapidated areas, and providing some 532 houses and 11 houses of 33 flats for the “labouring classes”. Since 1906 Cork Corporation has spent over £51,000 in re-surfacing the streets. The question of widening certain streets had been under consideration and amongst others, improvements had been carried out at Friary Lane, French’s Quay, and Windmill Road. The Housing Committee of Cork Corporation had secured an option on two sites for housing, on the outskirts of the city at College Road and near Roches Buildings, and had asked for a Local Government Board Inquiry into a Housing Scheme for Cork.
D J Coakley highlighted his view that in 1917 houses were built more or less haphazard and without any proper formulated general plan. In his opinion nothing could be of more vital importance to any city than that of its people should live in “good quality accommodation with beautiful surroundings”. He noted: “there is no doubt that when the dreadful war was over, schemes of housing and town planning could then be undertaken in all large cities”. He detailed the Corporation of Cork had already taken some important steps. There was a special committee to deal with the housing question. and they consistently called for State grants to address the matter. A considerable amount of valuable information relative to the condition of housing in the city had been collected.
Mr Coakley painted a stark picture of housing stock in the city. There was a very large proportion of unsanitary houses, as he described, not quite suitable for human beings to live in”. In referring to the tenement houses he stated that some of them were so old and dilapidated, and so structurally bad. Hence repairing them was out of the question, and, consequently, almost forty houses were closed some years previously because of being unfit for human habitation. Coakley made the case that accommodation was urgently needed for 115 families, whose houses just needed be demolished as they were in such a poor state.
Mr Coakley stated that overcrowding was a large challenge. In 719 tenement houses 726 cases of overcrowding were discovered. ln some cases the cubic space of the sleeping apartments amounted to only 72 cubic feet for each person. There were several instances of where the father and mother, and sons and daughters over 20 years of age, all slept in the same small apartment. Of the 12,850 houses in Cork, 1,500 were unprovided with back yards and nearly half were situated in the centre on the flat of the city.
Lack of space rendered it impossible to keep even the smallest stock of commodities. Coal, oil, and other fuels were usually stored under the bed. Mr Coakley spoke about endless drudgery and breeding places of mental deterioration; “endless drudgery, such as taking water up four or five flights of stairs uses up all the energy of the mother who has neither time nor strength to give to the care of her children; from these breeding places of mental, moral, and physical deterioration emerge the work-shys and unemployables, born and bred in insanitary slums, with the gutter for a play-ground”.
In his conclusion Mr Coakley outlined a number of potential solutions. He was excited about the next steps to be taken to formulate a competition tor the best plan for the future development of the city. He wished to offer a prize sufficiently large to attract the very best brains in the subject of housing and town planning. Cork’s new Housing Schemes needed to be in the suburbs and landowners should be encouraged to develop their own estates. The question of co-partnership housing with private landlords was worthy of serious consideration. The rents of the poorer classes were not sufficient to enable houses to be built economically for them by private enterprise, and that, therefore, a State’s contribution was necessary in addition to a State loan. The Housing Committee of Cor Corporation was taking active steps to secure a State grant for Housing. Coakley also called for a joint housing and town planning committee to consider the housing question in its different aspects-social, economic, engineering and legal and to make surveys. A Cork Town Planning Association was founded in 1922 and the document Cork: A Civic Survey emerged in 1926. The survey can be viewed on the local studies website of Cork City Library on the Grand Parade, www.corkpastandpresent.ie or viewed in local studies in hard copy.
Secret Cork, which is my 2017 book, and published by Amberley Press, is now in Cork bookshops. For information on other publications check out www.corkheritage.ie
Captions:
924a. D J Coakley, Principal, Cork School of Commerce, c.1917 (source: Cork City Library)
924b. Section of slum area to the south west of St Finbarre’s Cathedral; twenty acres of which was demolished in the early 1930s to make way for Cork Corporation’s social housing scheme (source: Cork City Library)
This week, one hundred years ago, the Cork cargo steamer SS Ardmore was attacked and sank without warning at 10.30pm on Tuesday night, 13 November 1917. In an account of the History of Port of Cork Steam Navigation by William J Barry in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (1918) he relates the SS Ardmore made her maiden voyage from London to Cork in 1909 and kept sailing on that line, even after the start of World War I. The ship had carried men during the war to the French coast. She had a stationary crew of 27 and was under the command of Captain Richard Murray.
The SS Ardmore left London and set sail for Cork on 13 November 1917 with her crew of 27 and general cargo onboard. The chief engineer of the ship on this trip was Michael J O’Sullivan, three of whose brothers were also steamship engineers. He was not permanently attached to the SS Ardmore but an event necessitated Michael remaining ashore for some days. That caused a transfer of another engineer officer to his former ship, and he being again fit for duty, was posted to the SS Ardmore on her voyage.
Before the ship left London, her crew were told to be extra careful during the voyage as a large amount of German U-Boat activity was reported with several ships being hit and sunk in the area only days before. The crew were given detailed orders when they started their voyage. They were instructed to sail to Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, Wales first and wait until it became night, so the SS Ardmore could cross the Irish Channel under the shield of the darkness of night.
In accordance with instructions she called at Milford Haven, leaving shortly after. At 10pm on 13 November, when about six miles off the Coningbeg Light Vessel, on the Wexford coast, a challenge was flashed out by morse signal asking: “What ship is that, where bound?” Captain Murray, in accordance with sailing instructions ordering him to answer challenges, replied: “Ardmore, London to Cork”. The night being hazy, it was problematic to view objects at very great distance, sometimes the haze developed into a dense fog, and although the outline of the vessel suggested a patrol boat, there was agreement in the post attack and report writing phase that it was a submarine, which sent the SS Ardmore to the bottom of the sea.
At about 10.30pm, when Captain Murray and Richard Jagoe, chief officer, were on the bridge, an enormous explosion happened on the starboard side forward of the bridge, quaking the ship from stem to stern, at the same time shattering g all the glass in the wheel-house. The Captain ordered the boats to be launched immediately, and with the chief officer assisted to lower the forward starboard lifeboat, some of the crew being already in it. The ship remained upright for a very short time, then suddenly plunged head foremost into the depths of the sea, taking everything and all on board down with her.
The chief engineer Michael O’Sullivan and engine room staff were killed by the torpedo explosion. The second mate before jumping into the sea. put a coloured signal light in his pocket, and when clinging to the broken boat managed to ignite it. The flare enabled the drowning men to secure pieces of wreckage, which kept them afloat. Captain Murray and the second-engineer. who was injured, spent a terrible night, clinging to the up turned boat, with seas breaking over them.
Many of the hands were left struggling in the water. The captain and six others managed to reach one of the starboard lifeboats, and when the swirl of waters calmed down over the sunken vessel, searched about in the inky gloom for any who might be afloat. Through the night they drifted to and fro.
A poignant tragedy was that listed amongst those lost were two men both named Timothy Twomey. They were a father and son, and residents of Mill Cottages, Glanmire. The younger man could have been saved, but he went to the rescue of his father who was trapped below and even though both were strong swimmers they were lost. The younger Twomey had a baby son, Jimmy, of fifteen months. He grew up to be a well-known GAA figure in the Glanmire-Glountane area and was a prominent hurler with Sarsfields Hurling Club.
The two rescue boats, one was a patrol boat called Au Breitia and the second was an American steamship called IH Lookingback. One of the first survivors to be picked up was Corkman Michael Walsh who was the cook on the ship. He had spent some considerable time in the water, hanging on to a cattle board spar, and was suffering severely from shock. He was immediately conveyed to hospital, and at first it was thought that he was the only one saved from the ill-fated vessel. Later, however, news reached the port that seven other members of the crew had been rescued. Later another vessel came across a boat with the captain and six men, took them on board, and conveyed there to Queenstown. There were no further survivors.
Note: My public historical walking tours are finished till next Spring; thanks to everyone who came out and walked the different suburbs this year. Secret Cork, which is my 2017 book and published by Amberley Press, is now in Cork bookshops.
Captions:
921a. SS Ardmore, c.1910 (source: Cork City Library)
921b. Coningbeg Lightship off Wexford coast, early twentieth century (source: London Metropolitan Archives)
(A) To ask the CE about the progress of ongoing considerations for a tree replanting programme for the 500 fallen trees lost from Storm Ophelia? (B) Plus to ask about the number of trees removed as part of the ongoing City Centre Traffic Strategy and the reasons why? (Cllr Kieran McCarthy)
Motions:
That the City Council works towards preparing an application for the EU Green Capital Award. The Awards aim to reward the efforts of cities who strive to improve the lives of their citizens, become role models and commit to environmental, social and economic sustainability (Cllr Kieran McCarthy).
That the translation of the Tomás McCurtain diaries, being currently led by the Cork Decorative Fine Arts Society in association with Cork Public Museum be supported by Cork City Council as part of the Decade of Centenaries (Cllr Kieran McCarthy).
This month St Finbarr’s Cemetery in Glasheen marks its 150th anniversary of its opening for public burials. Since mid-November 1867, this beautiful cemetery has become an iconic space of reflection, art and architecture. Its back story is a long and complex one and this article attempts to shine some light on it.
The Burial Ground Act of 1856 gave great legal and financial powers to Cork Corporation for attaining cemetery ground. A growing population and limited cemetery space in graveyards such as St Joseph’s in Cork City led the Cemeteries Committee of the Corporation in late February 1863 to seek new burial ground. The Committee publicly sought in newspapers like the Cork Examiner tenders for forty acres of ground in or adjacent to the northern suburbs of the City, and a similar acreage on the south side. Sealed proposals were to be lodged on or before 28 October, to the town clerk, Alexander McCarthy, whose office was at 33 South Mall. Some ideas were received but a lack of momentum existed to pursue the matter.
Nearly seven months later, a meeting at the Mayor’s Office at no 20 South Mall on Saturday 25 May 1864 was held for the purpose of considering the defective state of burial accommodation in the City. The Mayor, Sir John Arnott in the chair, resolved that a company be formed, on the principle of limited liability, with a capital of £10,000 in 2,000 shares of £5 each, with power to increase it if it was necessary. It was decided that when the company was formed, sites should be advertised for and the most suitable should be selected for shortlisting. The committee consisted of the Mayor, Sir John Abbott, C J Cantillon, J P Booth, Thomas Jennings, Dominic O’Connor, Alderman Hegarty, Alderman Keller and M J Collins.
In late June 1864, daily advertisements by the Cork Cemeteries Company in the Cork Examiner sought twenty acres of land to purchase, to be situated within three miles of the City. Sealed proposals, stating particulars of title and cost, were to be lodged at Alexander McCarthy’s office on the South Mall. In the autumn of 1864, three sites were discussed at length in the Cork Examiner. The present site St Finbarr’s Cemetery on Glasheen Road was pitched but there was initially limited support for it within Cork Corporation. In late September 1864, Fred G Deverall, County Surveyor inspected the lands called the Commons, part of the Corporation’s lands, situated on the north side of the City, He examined the ground and found three sites, which could be made available for the purpose, one of which. contained twenty acres held by one tenant. His team dug six trial pits to ascertain the nature and depth of the soil in different places, and found an average of over seven feet of dry clay and gravel.
The third piece of ground proposed was close to Wellington Square, comprising six acres. It was not supported by those living and working within the vicinity. The Jennings estate was nearby as well as 31 inhabited cabins within a radius of 100 yards, and 55 within a distance of 200 yards. It was also in the immediate vicinity of the County Gaol and the Queen’s College. In Wellington Square there was a well or pump, which was the source of water used by the residents of the locality, and would be within twenty-three yards of the cemetery. The Professor of Geology in Queen’s College, Cork testified that the ground in some places was deficient in depth of soil.
By spring 1865, the Cork Cemeteries Company failed to get the public investment it needed and the company folded. The search for a burial ground continued for another year into early 1866. However, a sum of finance was acquired from the Westminster Treasury on favourable terms through the intervention of Cork MP John Francis Maguire.
By late November 1866, the Corporation’s cemetery committee and the Corporation selected 15 acres of flat and rectangular ground at Glasheen. The cost would be £600 to the occupying lease-holder and £125 to the tenant who was growing crops on the site. The Cemetery Committee prepared to receive proposals for building a boundary wall, to enclose the land taken by the Corporation for the cemetery. The ground combined the various qualities required for a cemetery as the soil was dry, sandy and deep. A plan of the intended cemetery was prepared by Sir John Benson, the city engineer. The ground was to be laid out much on the plan of Glasnevin in Dublin, and planted with ornamental shrubs, and divided by walks.
A fourth of the entire new cemetery space was to be allotted for the burials of persons of the poorer classes who would not be able to pay the charge to be made for interments. Two thirds of the cemetery were to be reserved for Roman Catholics and one third for Protestants. Each religion was to have a mortuary chapel for its separate use. By mid-January 1867, the Cemetery Committee sought tenders from competent parties for the erection of two chapels on the grounds of the new cemetery. In late April 1867, the Committee sought proposals from competent parties for the building of a registry office at the entrance to the cemetery.
Captions:
920a. St Finbarr’s Cemetery, present day (picture: Kieran McCarthy)
920b. Ornate statue, St Finbarr’s Cemetery, present day (picture: Kieran McCarthy)
