Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 29 May 2014

“Historical Walking Tour of the Old Cork Workhouse,

 St Finbarr’s Hospital”

On Saturday, 7 June at 12noon in association with the Friends of St Finbarr’s Hospital and their summer garden fete, I will conduct a historical walking tour of the hospital (free; meet at gate) and in particular its workhouse past. I have always admired the view from the entrance gate onto the rolling topography extending to beyond the southern boundaries of the City. Here also is the intersection of the built heritage of Turners Cross, Ballinlough and Douglas. These are Cork’s self sufficient, confident and settled suburbs, which encompass former traditions of market gardening to Victorian and Edwardian housing on the Douglas Road. Then there is the Free State private housing by the Bradley Brothers such as in Ballinlough and Cork Corporation’s social housing developments, designed by Daniel Levie, on Capwell Road. Douglas Road as a routeway has seen many changes over the centuries from being a rough trackway probably to begin with to the gauntlet it has become today during the work and school start and finish hours.

Standing at the gate of St Finbarr’s Hospital reflecting on all the above histories and memories above begs the question on how do you even blend these in to a tour without leaving your audience behind. With mid nineteenth century roots, the hospital was the site of the city’s former workhouse but as such here is one of Cork’s and Ireland’s national historic markers. Written in depth over the years by scholars such as Sr M Emmanuel Browne and Colman O’Mahony, what has survived to outline the history of the hospital are many in-depth primary documents. What shines out are the memories of how people have struggled at this site since its creation in 1841. Other topics perhaps can also be pursued here such as the history of social justice at the site, why and how society takes care of the vulnerable in society and the framing of questions on ideas of giving humanity and dignity to people and how they have evolved over the centuries.

The key feature of this tour or trail is the story of the hospital and an attempt to unravel its memories. The Hospital serves as a vast repository of memories, symbolism, iconography and cultural debate. It has plaques, ruins and haunted memories. Standing at the former workhouse buildings, which opened in December 1841, there is much to think about – humanity and the human experience. The architect to the Poor Law Commissioners in Ireland from 1839 until 1855 was George Wilkinson. George was born in 1814, a son of W.A. Wilkinson, carpenter and builder of Witney, Oxfordshire. His younger brother William Wilkinson was also an architect.  In 1835, following the Poor Law Amendment Act of August 1834, which provided for the construction of 350 workhouses in England and Wales, Wilkinson won the competition for designing the workhouse at Thames, Oxfordshire. During the next three years, while he was still in his early twenties, he designed many other workhouses in Oxfordshire and elsewhere in England and Wales.

In July 1838 with the passing of the Act for the More Effectual Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland the workhouse system was extended to Ireland. According to the provisions of the act, 130 workhouses were to be built. Whereas different architects had been able to compete for workhouse commissions in England and Wales, the Poor Law Commissioners proposed that in Ireland the Board of Works should be given sole responsibility for all the workhouses. When this proved impossible for legal reasons, they invited Wilkinson and two other architects to submit designs for a prototype Irish workhouse. On the strength of his experience in Wales “under circumstances, and with materials not very dissimilar from what exist in Ireland”, in January 1839 Wilkinson was appointed the Commissioners’ architect in Ireland, responsible for the design and erection of all 130 Irish workhouses. He was to be paid a salary of £500 per annum and provided with a full-time assistant and a clerk, to be paid £150 and £100 per annum respectively.

Nearly all the workhouses, accommodating between 200 and 2000 persons apiece, were designed in a Tudor domestic idiom, with picturesque gabled entrance buildings which contracted the size and comfortlessness of the institutions which lay behind them. New workhouses opened at a steady rate, and in April 1843 Wilkinson reported that 112 were finished. By this time his staff had increased to seven assistants and two clerks. By 1842, Wilkinson reported that his team had drawn up 5,200 sheets of large drawings. By April 1847 all 130 workhouses were complete in 130 Unions.

With its association with the memory of the Great Famine, there are also many threads of the history of the Douglas Road workhouse to interweave – the political, economic and social framework of Ireland at that time plus the on the ground reality of life in the early 1800s – family, cultural contexts, individual portraits. In the present day history books in school, the reader is drawn to very traumatic terms. The recurring visions comprise human destruction, trauma, devastation, loss. One can see why the Great Famine is more on the forgetting list than on the remembering one. More on the walking tour…

Caption:

743a. Sunset rays on the memorial plaque and boundary wall of St Finbarr’s Hospital, Douglas Road (picture: Kieran McCarthy)