Dublin Folktales (6 page)

Billy hid himself behind a hedge in the next field in a vain attempt to avoid capture. He was soon detected and taken away by members of the newly formed Dublin Police which, in 1786, had replaced the old watchmen system. Most of the valuables taken from the ladies were picked up on the ground where the attack had taken place. Billy-in-
the-Bowl was placed in a barrow and brought in disgrace to jail and trial in Green Street. Unusually for the time, he was not hanged for his crimes of murder, but was sentenced to hard labour for the remainder of his days on earth.

Billy-in-the-Bowl’s days of charming his victims to death were over. Life returned to normal in the quiet lanes, but for long afterwards, few people would undertake the journey alone, for who knew what lay around the next corner. Be it man or half man, the story of Billy-in-the-Bowl meant that caution was called for on the journey to the outskirts of Dublin City.

Some people believe in the power of relics. Others have no time for them at all; they dismiss them as superstitious nonsense. There was a man in Dublin City who was a fervent believer in the relics of one particular holy man to whom he had a special devotion and he sold these relics to anyone that wanted one. To make them even more exclusive, he did not advertise that he had any such relics in his possession, much less that he would part with the odd one for a donation. A donation to what he never would say, but it was assumed he was speaking about a donating to some religious or charitable cause related to Matt Talbot, a decent and religious man that dropped dead in 1925 on a Dublin street on his way to early morning mass.

At this time, our friend Hatcha lived on Rutland Street Upper, the same street as Matt. Rutland Street was off Summerhill and the old Georgian houses were sub-divided. Just a few years earlier, at the time of the national headcount of 1911, there were six families sharing the house where Talbot lived. He shared his quarters with his mother who had brought him into the world when she was nineteen years old. She was by then seventy-six years old and had produced a dozen children, a not unusual number for the time. Talbot had not had much schooling before he began to seek work in the docks area, along with thousands of his
contemporaries. The fortunate ones would be hired at the factory gate for a morning's or a day's work. Once work slowed down, such workers were dismissed or just not hired at all. Poverty reigned supreme.

Matt went to work in a wine merchant's store, a bad place for anyone who had a liking for alcohol. Before long, he was sampling the wares in the wine store and had started a love affair with drink that was to endure for many a day. In time, he left to work in the Custom House Dock with its warehouses filled with goods of all descriptions, including bonded whiskey.

Before mechanisation was introduced to handling of a ship's cargo, gangs of men unloaded and loaded lorries that came and went with barrels, boxes, bales, kegs and chests of all sorts of goods, destined for docking or departing ships. To be a fully paid worker in Custom House Dock, you had to have arrived at the age of majority. If you were younger than twenty-one, you were paid what was termed ‘Boy's Wages', in other words, a pittance. Talbot was put to work in the whiskey stores. Before long, he was a confirmed alcoholic. He spent whatever wages he received and ran up debts besides wherever he could get credit.

This way of life went on for a further sixteen years, until, one day, Talbot decided to become a teetotaller following a cathartic moment of self-realisation. He was to embrace sobriety for the remaining forty years of his life. He began to attend daily mass, and to repay his debts to those he could find to whom he owed money.

By the time the 1913 lockout of workers began in Dublin, when employers locked out workers for seeking better conditions and pay, Talbot was working in the huge timber yard of T&C Martin in the docks. The men in T&C Martin found themselves on the workers' side. A union member, Talbot gave his strike pay to other workers that he considered to be in poorer circumstances than he. He continued to live alone in a small room with very little furniture
after his mother's death in 1915. He slept on a plank bed with a piece of timber for a pillow. He rose at 5 a.m. every day to attend mass, before walking on to work. On Sundays he attended several masses.

Appropriately perhaps for a holy man, he dropped dead on the public street on Granby Lane on 7 June on his way to mass in the Dominican church on Dominick Street. After his sudden demise it was discovered that Talbot was a religious zealot. He wore chains under his clothing to mortify his flesh in pursuit of personal excellence. People began to pray to him for intercession in their own lives. His coffined remains may be seen to this day in his parish church on Sean McDermott Street. Lots of Dublin people still pray to him for help with whatever troubles them in their daily lives.

However there were two camps: those that thought him mad to be doing such a thing to himself and those that thought him a saintly man who was even now in heaven and who could intercede with God in particular cases, if asked civilly and properly.

Hatcha was a non-believer, but saw no reason whatsoever not to benefit from the excitement and wonder of it all. After all, God helps those who help themselves. People began calling to the street to see the place where Talbot lived. Hatcha, being an entrepreneur before the word was ever coined, took it upon himself to be the liaison officer for the street. Those who believed Talbot to be the real thing were happy with any information that Hatcha and his pals could give them. Most of it was made up, for Talbot had been too enthusiastic about his prayerfulness and early mass for a lot of them to bother with him. Many on the street preferred to lie abed until the streets were well aired.

By and by, Hatcha noticed that people were touching the street railings that ran along the front of the old three-storey over-basement house that were put there to prevent people from falling down to the basement level below. He asked a few of them why they were doing that. They replied
they were saying a silent prayer to Matt Talbot for their own intentions, meaning they were asking him for something they could not get themselves.

It was only a short step from there for Hatcha to say he had acquired the plank that his old friend Matt used to sleep on along with the pillow. He had been successfully treating them for woodworm, he said, of which there was a lot about in the days before science began eradicating them; so people would readily accept this as a reason for his possessing a dead man's bed. Sadly, he said quietly, poor Matt no longer had any use for either, having gone to his eternal rest where all the pillows were made of clouds and the beds of pink and white marshmallows.

He would take a while to allow the penny to drop with his listener. He would even walk away up towards Great Charles Street at the upper end of Rutland Street as if he was heading around into Mountjoy Square on important business. He never got further than the nearest gas lamp on Rutland Street before his sleeve would be caught by his hurrying companion. ‘Would there be any chance of getting the bed or the pillow maybe or even a lend of one or the other for the night?' he might be asked. He would allow that it would be good if he could, but sadly such had been the extent of the damage caused by the Devil's little helpers in the woodworm that there was not a whole lot left. He'd ask then what the supplicant had in mind for the aforementioned. Inevitably, it would be as a relic to apply to a troubled area or to be placed beneath the pillow of a sufferer in the hope of a cure. Hatcha would ask whether if a small piece of the pillow would suffice. If so, he could easily slice a sliver off and let the person have it for cost price, seeing as how it was for as good a cause as Matt had stood for when he was alive, even though he had not lived to settle up with Hatcha for the work undertaken against the woodworm. No sooner said than done, and the delighted admirer of the late Matt Talbot parted company with their cash.

Hatcha started off a chain of customers, as word spread of the secret of the relics of Matt Talbot. Business took off so well that Hatcha was hard set to keep up with the demand for more and more relics of his late neighbour. He did not, of course, have possession of anything at all that had belonged to Talbot, nor did he even know where his few bits of furniture had gone to after his death. They had most likely been purloined for firewood by someone else. Hatcha, you see, had taken an old wooden wardrobe belonging to his late uncle and had chopped it into smithereens in the back garden of his own house. These bits he then sold – with the sharpness planed off them in case anyone was injured by accident – as bits of Talbot's plank bed.

Many is the happy man that brought home a bit of Hatcha's uncle's wardrobe and persuaded his wife to pray over it for their good intentions, mostly relating to drink problems. Many is the wife who doubted it did any good at all, but who muttered away over the bit of wood sitting on top of the chest of drawers, in the hope that it might keep her man a little closer to home, in future. Just as the enthusiastic Hatcha was thinking of hiring a few sub-contractors on the far side of the city to help him with his thriving business, it all came tumbling down around him.

When he had run out of chopped wood from his uncle's wardrobe, he started going to the auction rooms along Bachelors Walk and Ormond Quay. He placed bids on a wardrobe every week and brought each home in the dark of the evening on a borrowed handcart. His end came on a night when he stopped for a drink on Parnell Street and parked the cart with the wardrobe around the corner. When he came out, he saw that someone had stolen the handcart and had left the wardrobe standing there against the wall, as it was unsuited to the requirements of whatever the job was the handcart was now engaged upon.

There was nothing for it but to put the wardrobe up on his back and to walk up Summerhill, like a snail with his
house upon his back. Small children soon started to follow him asking if he was going to live inside the wardrobe or was he going to rent it out for dances. Once children gathered, adults took notice of the strange sight of a red-faced Hatcha struggling home with the wardrobe. The game was finally up when he turned the corner into the street and found there was a queue of people there waiting for their promised relics. Hatcha put down the wardrobe and said he would be back in a while and left them to it.

Some people believe in the power of relics while other people have no time for them at all. Hatcha had no intention of being the referee when the ructions started over where the relics of Matt Talbot came from in the first place and whether he was a saint or a madman. It was enough to drive any one to drink. Hatcha had no view on that, one way or another. He was off to find the handcart thief and to have a word with him.

Many people will be familiar with the part of Dublin where an archbishop used to read the Canon of the Mass in the years following his public hanging. It is not so far away on Gallows Green, where modern Baggot Street now lies and where the ghosts of victims past must surely linger to this day.

Witnesses reported that on dark and stormy nights, the ghost of the archbishop, dressed in the mourning vestments of the time, was to be seen reading by a pale light on a phantom altar raised over his grave in St Kevin's Cemetery on Camden Row. It was said that, during the mass, when the ghost came to the raising of the Host, the lights flickered out and the altar was nowhere to be seen.

The people of Dublin made pilgrimage to his grave to pray for many years after his ignominious execution. Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, a Limerick man, was hanged in 1584 when the Penal Laws were in force and Queen Elizabeth I was the supreme head of the Protestant Church in Britain and Ireland. The Penal Laws were a series of measures imposed to discriminate against Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters in favour of the established Church of Ireland. It was a treasonable offence to refuse to acknowledge the English monarch as head of the Church. Many Catholics who refused to do so were put to death as a result of this.

Under such restrictions, visits to the grave of a dead Catholic Archbishop were fraught with danger for the prayerful. Attendance gradually fell away until the practice of praying there died off altogether and the grave and its troubled occupant were left in peace.

Dermot O'Hurley was born in County Limerick in the early sixteenth century. Once grown to manhood, he went to the Continent to undergo the necessary training to become a priest. He resided in Belgium for fifteen years, where he was appointed Professor at Louvain, following his ordination. He held the chair of Canon Law at Rheims for four years. In 1581, whilst he was at Rome, he was appointed to be Archbishop of Cashel.

In those penal days of both severe and petty restriction, Catholic churchmen had to travel in disguise for their personal safety. O'Hurley opted to travel alone to avoid spies and informers who wanted to benefit by unmasking any priest they could find to the authorities. A bishop would carry a fine reward for the informer. O'Hurley was particularly cautious on his return to his native land not to be apprehended. For added security, his papers and everything to do with his new job were sent as cargo in another ship. As fortune would have it, the second ship was taken by pirates. But the pirates were themselves taken in by the authorities.