Dublin Urban Legends

By Brendan Nolan

Who stole the Irish crown jewels? Is there a secret tunnel in O’Connell Street? And did the word ‘quiz’ originate in Dublin as the result of a bet?Urban legends are the funny and frightening folklore people share today. Just like the early folk tales that came before them, these tales are formed from reactions to events in the modern world, and reflect our current values. For the first time, Brendan Nolan explores the power of Dublin’s urban legend – murky stories whispered in classrooms and back streets, and ripping yarns passed on across the bar. Urban legends may be just exaggerated rumours, but they embed themselves into local folklore. The real question is, what truth lies behind them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: May 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780750964630

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www.brendannolan.ie

1

THE SURRENDERED BABY

DUBLIN BUS DRIVERS are known for their courtesy and rapport with their passengers and a legend that circulates around Dublin city from time to time concerns a bus driver, well known for his affability, and a young mother with a baby in a pushchair.

Sometimes, the story of the surrendered baby and the bus driver is set in Ringsend. Now a quiet backwater of the city, Ringsend was formerly a place of considerable importance, having been for some 200 years the principal packet station in Ireland for communication with Britain. In August 1649, Oliver Cromwell, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by unanimous vote of Parliament, landed at Ringsend with an army of 12,000 men, artillery and a large quantity of munitions. He passed through Ringsend on the way to victory over his opponents at Drogheda.

But, by the time Dublin Bus took over the local bus routes, all this excitement was long gone and few could remember what Cromwell looked like at all. Nevertheless, a single mother managed to stir up a great deal of excitement in her own way: by giving her infant son away to a passing stranger.

Most long-time residents of Ringsend know one another through family ties, school, work or other social interactions and the regular passengers on the passing bus service would know one another by sight, if not by name. Yet, on the morning in question, none of the witnesses were later able to identify the girl with the small child in a pushchair who waited silently for the next bus to arrive at the stop.

When the bus doors swished open the older residents stood back to allow the young mother to board. She removed the child from the pushchair and stepped on to the platform of the bus. Nowadays there is a security screen between the driver’s seat and the public but at that time there was none. The mother smiled at the driver and handed him the baby, asking him to hold the infant while she lifted the empty pushchair from the footpath. Without thinking too much about it, the affable driver took the baby in his arms and began doing what most people do when handed a baby. He smiled at it and attempted to entice the child to reciprocate with laughter, a gurgle or a kick of the foot.

He did not notice that the mother was taking a long time to lift a now-empty pushchair on to the bus. The other passengers were still standing on the footpath, wondering what was going to happen next. Tiring of the inactivity, and wishing to be off about his business, an impatient pensioner informed the driver that the mother of the child was gone. Gone? Yes, she was gone and the pushchair was where she had left it. Not that the pushchair was of any interest to the bus driver who was now left with a child to mind and a bus to drive.

Unable to do both, he did the only thing possible: he contacted his dispatcher by two-way radio. Once he had persuaded his incredulous colleague that he was in fact immobilised by a small child, the driver asked all gathered within earshot if they knew who the young woman was? Nobody did.

The dispatcher rang the Garda who sent a two-person team to deal with the incident. They could not take the baby with them in a squad car so they contacted the health authority to ask what they might do with a baby abandoned on a bus on a busy day in the city. An ambulance was dispatched to collect the baby and once the child was taken into care, the bus driver was free to board his passengers and proceed on his route, if somewhat later than scheduled.

The pushchair was taken into custody by the gardaí and the streets of Ringsend returned to normal, though word of the strange abandonment of a child to a bus driver soon spread through the startled community. The story became even more bizarre when the young mother presented herself a few days later at a Garda station to ask for her baby back. She explained that she was a single mother and had been at her wits' end as to how she was going to make ends meet for herself and her child. To ease the pressure and to ensure the child was well taken care of and safe for a while, she thought it a good idea to hand the child to the bus driver who seemed kind and so would ensure the child would be looked after.

The legend recalls earlier tough times in Dublin city, when women gave up their children in the sure knowledge that they would never see them again. And so, in 1704, the Foundling Hospital of Dublin was opened to cater for children whose parents could not or would not care for them. Up to 2,000 children were received annually and to fund the place, income was derived from a duty on coal sold in the city. Coal was the principal means of heating homes in eighteenth-century Dublin and so a large revenue was derived from the levy.

Nonetheless, conditions in the Dublin foundling hospital were particularly bad. Of 52,150 children admitted during the thirty years ending January 1826, some 41,524 of them died. Dublin legends says that some of the unfortunate children were sped on their way by callous handling and a bottle containing a concoction to make them sleep their life away.

Perhaps the folk memory of those times leads people to share the modern story of the young mother who handed her baby to a bus driver and ran away, only to show up days later seeking custody of her child. She avoided bureaucratic paperwork in handing her child to a stranger, just as no complicated applications or certificates were required for admittance of a child to the foundling hospital.

Indeed, to facilitate the easy abandonment of a child, the parent, usually the mother, could commit a child without seeing another human being. A bell on a chain hung beside the door of the porter's lodge and when the bell was rung, a cradle was pushed out for the reception of the child. Once the child was placed in the cradle it was passed into the interior of the hospital, never to be seen, for the most part, by those outside ever again.

Once inside, the child was processed when a certificate was pinned to its clothes, stating its given name and estimated age. This information, with the date of reception, was carefully registered so the person who left the child could retrieve it if their fortunes changed: in the ten years from 1801 to 1811 some 567 of the children were reclaimed by their parents.

It was common for the parent to attach some identifying token to the child before it was placed in the cradle: a piece of coloured cloth was most usual. Though those who had no intention of ever seeing the child again might pass them over without any identifier at all.

Most children deposited were born out of wedlock and some were the children of prostitutes impregnated by clients; in the twenty-one years to 1796, 10,201 of the children sent to the hospital had diseases which proved them the offspring of prostitutes, according to the hospital’s records. Despite this, entry to the hospital was not confined to children deemed illegitimate by reason of the circumstances of their birth, but was open to every offspring in want or distress.

However, in consequence of the recommendation of the Commissioners of Inquiry in 1829, gradual suppression of the Dublin institution began and its doors were closed to any further intake. This led to yet more stories about how desperate people faced up to the reality of their circumstance.

A clergyman reported that following closure of the hospital in 1830 he had been informed of two particular cases that were strange indeed.

In the first, a farmer was planting potatoes with his workers. He and his labourers went to dinner in the middle of the day, leaving a sack half full of cut potatoes on a cart. When they returned an hour later and shook out the potatoes for planting, an infant fell out from the bag. The ground was soft and the child was not injured. The mother was never discovered, nor was it ever determined how she had managed to put the child in the sack without being observed by anyone. The child was placed with a poor labourer’s wife who had several children already, but who nonetheless took the infant into her family as one of her own.

The same clergyman, who seemed to have an abundance of such incidents in his parish, or was perhaps more attentive to the passing tale than others were, reported another incident shortly thereafter.

A cotter’s wife went to buy some meal, leaving only a child behind to mind her own house. On her return, she was surprised to find a large bundle of dry ferns lying on the floor. Ferns burn easily, so she lifted them up to place them under a pot of potatoes as fuel, and was shocked to hear a child cry as she did so. On examination, she found an infant rolled up in the bundle of ferns.

On asking her own child if she saw anything amiss while she was away, she heard that a woman had come into the house with something wrapped up in a shawl. She asked the child to get her a drink of water and, while the child was doing so, the woman must have transferred the infant to the bundle of ferns.

While the household already had seven children in it, the woman took the abandoned infant in, only to see it weaken and die, despite her best efforts at saving it. Such was the high rate of infant mortality of the time.

At least the modern story resulted in the happy reunion of the mother with the child left for safekeeping with the bus driver in Ringsend.

2

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

VISITORS TO THE city of Dublin, and in particular to O’Connell Bridge which spans the River Liffey, often pause to celebrate a man who never was and inadvertently salute a clock that went away. In fact, a great many people have their picture taken standing beside the plaque to Fr Pat Noise, a fictitious character who has become part of Dublin folklore. His plaque is set into the parapet of the bridge on the western side of the busy thoroughfare. The plaque was even the subject of debate in the city council when officials made to remove it and elected councillors voted to retain it.

The story began in 1994, when the National Lottery administration set aside funding to provide a five-year attraction in the river similar to the George Pompidou Centre in Paris. In Paris a visitor could place a small amount of money in a machine at the Pompidou Centre to purchase a postcard of the centre with a time and date stamp upon it, recording the moment the visitor stood there. Publicists for the National Lottery proposed that a digital clock be placed on the bed of the Liffey and would count down the seconds to the new millennium at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which would be some 119,757,600 seconds away from the first tocking of the clock on New Year’s Day 1995. Just as in Paris, people would be able to purchase a postcard on the bridge showing the time they stood there.

It was to be a grand affair. The submerged clock would be surrounded by metallic-coloured carbon fibre, fixed on buoys from which loudspeakers would send out, every 30 seconds, recorded sounds of Dublin life. This was to include the rolling of wooden barrels on pavements, foghorns, seagulls’ cries and the calls of Moore Street market traders extolling their wares.

However, the clock did not quite work out the way it was supposed to. It quickly earned itself the soubriquet of the ‘Chime in the Slime’ from bemused Dubliners, who could not see the numerals through the water once the flowing river got at it and covered it with something or other of its own making. The clock also stopped on a regular basis and, when restarted, chose its own countdown numbers to display – which did not always match the passing time of most Dubliners. Then it vanished altogether.

According to an official spokesman, this was to allow boats to pass over the spot, which was strange since boat traffic at that location at the time was not very plentiful. It was even suggested, irreverently, that a visiting stage magician had made it disappear as part of his stage act. Many Dubliners who had become used to saluting the clock on crossing the bridge wondered what had become of time in Dublin. But then, one day, it was back again, blinking upwards at observers on the bridge.

Nonetheless, by December 1996, it was time-up for the millennium clock. Slime had so covered it that seekers after the correct time