Whitworth Place, one of the first suburban streets in Dublin, was built at a time when Drumcondra was considered a resort
‘BARRY GRANT? Sorry, who’s Barry Grant?” The phone line is terrible and I can’t make out what the man at the other end is saying. He seems to be mourning the passing of this Barry Grant chap because he might have been able to fill me in on the back story of Peter Leech, the publican who bought my house from a priest more than 140 years ago.
“You don’t know who Cary Grant is?” The owner of the Red Parrot on Dorset Street sounds incredulous as the mobile phone crackle suddenly disappears. “Of course I know who Cary Grant is. What has Cary Grant got to do with anything?” Just a bit, as it turns out.
Grant, who was forced by a movie studio to change his name from Archibald Leach after crossing the Atlantic in search of stardom in the 1920s, was by all accounts – well, this publican’s account anyway – connected to the lesser known Leech family who bought my house on this nearly leafy Drumcondra road from a Canon McMahon in 1871.
Having spent long hours sifting through archive material about the area, my house and its previous owners, I’d yet to stumble upon anything shocking or interesting about my house. No one was murdered here, no IRA men hid in the chimneys from the crown’s forces, it was attached to no scandal – so I ignore the different spelling of the surname and leap upon this tangential link to Tinsel Town with an almost unseemly excitement.
The northside Leeches were loaded and they owned, but never lived in, all 10 houses on Whitworth Place which makes it doubtful that the movie star ever sat in my livingroom supping tea – unless, of course, he helped his dear old uncle out with rent collections in the 1920s and 1930s.
It seems unlikely.
Whitworth Place, which fronts on to the Royal Canal, was built in 1854 and was one of the very first suburban streets in Dublin. It takes its name from Charles, Earl Whitworth who was Lord Lieutenant between 1813 and 1817. He laid the foundation stone of the GPO in August 1814 but was more famous for his role as the ambassador to the court of Napoleon when the brief Peace of Amiens between Britain and France was signed at the turn of the 19th century.
The place named in his honour has seen a worrying amount of police traffic over the past 150 years. Inevitably, it is the most grisly stories which scream loudest for attention and it is hard to get more grisly than two dismembered corpses being pulled from the canal nearby or eight people shot dead within a kilometre of my front door.
But seeing as these events happened after I moved here in the early part of this decade, there’s no need to dwell on them, not least because I’d hate my neighbours to blame me for property prices in Drumcondra taking a fresh nosedive.
The crimes of yesteryear were a lot more genteel. In 1913 Francis Jones, who lived three doors up, was charged with stealing bicycles from various locations on the city’s northside. Jones had been commendably assiduous in covering his tracks and, after he had flogged the wheels off one of the bikes (to a man named Blunn for four shillings), he’d buried the frame 3ft under his back garden. The grave wasn’t deep enough for the Royal Irish Constabulary who dug up his garden, uncovered the damning evidence and hauled him up the street in chains.
The bold Francis wasn’t the only criminal on the street. In 1892 Robert Chapman, who lived two doors up in the other direction, was convicted of trying to obtain a typewriter worth £21, some surgical equipment and two boxes of eggs from a company on Ormond Quay. He was sent to prison for an unspecified period.
AND EIGHT YEARSlater the obviously well-to-do Bernard Murphy, who lived at the top of the road, was collared after his electric car collided with a hackney driver on Talbot Street. The hackney driver subsequently died from his injuries, becoming one of the earliest motor car-related fatalities in the city.
When the house was built, Drumcondra was a very different place to the heavily populated suburb of grand old redbricks and squalid bedsits it has become. It was actually considered a resort town, to which wealthy Dubliners would flee when life in the big smoke got too much.
In the late 1860s efforts were made to exploit a local well which was said to have medicinal qualities. Drinking Drumcondra water became all the rage for a brief period and canny residents decided to cash in and started by clearing the area of a mountain of unsightly old iron which had been dumped near the well. Overnight the water’s supposed medicinal qualities disappeared and it quickly became clear that the iron had been seeping into the water, lending it a metallic taste and a hint of medicine. Attempts to restore the well’s magic by bringing the scrap metal back failed miserably.
Plans to turn much of the area into a pleasure garden for the city’s well-heeled folk also foundered around the same time when first an iron factory and then a vitriol works, were built in nearby Ballybough. Say what you like about a vitriol works, it’s never going to be a welcome addition to any resort town.
IN 1905, NOTlong after James Joyce left Ireland for good, his family moved on to my street for the briefest of spells. They'd barely had a chance to settle in when their house, like all the houses on the road, was badly flooded following an August downpour. The houses sank under 2ft of water after just a single night of rain and the family took flight.
During their brief stay, it is unlikely the Joyce children had much time for the older people living in my house two doors up. According to the 1901 census, a widow by the name of Margaret Hanratty was the head of the house. She and her husband, Laurence, had moved from Campbell’s Row off the North Circular Road in the 1890s and rented the house of the Leeches.
This high-ceilinged, three-storey house was undoubtedly a step up for the couple and their four children but their time here as a happy family was depressingly brief and, within a few years of moving from a rundown house within the canals, Laurence died.
In the late 1890s, one of her sons, Bernard, married the girl next door, quite literally, and by the time the 1901 census was recorded Margaret was living in the house with her two remaining sons – both carpenters – a daughter, five lodgers and two servants. This should not create the impression the house is big – it has just six rooms, one of which was home to a young couple and their one-year-old daughter.
Fast-forward 10 years and things had improved – at least financially – for the Hanrattys. While they were still renting off the Leeches, they no longer needed to sublet out quite so much of their space to strangers. The carpenter sons Francis (30) and Michael (25) had not been as lucky in love as their older brother – no comely maidens had moved next door in the intervening years, sadly – and the pair were still living with their mammy. They had a single lodger, a blacksmith in his 20s, and a 17-year-old servant called Mary Blackburn.
In 1947, the house eventually changed hands when the third-generation Leeches sold it to the Lynches who became the first owner-occupiers and, unbeknown to themselves, broke the house’s first and, sadly, only link with the magic of Tinsel Town.
