Patrick Comerford
During a Christmas family visit to Dublin last week, I stayed in Rathmines. It was a short overnight stay, but I decided early in the morning to take a stroll back through some of the streets and places I had known in my childhood and teens in the area.
I found myself wandering through Leinster Square and Prince Arthur Terrace, Leinster Road and Leinster Road West, Effra Road and Denmark Hill, parts of Harold’s Cross, around the grounds of Leinster Cricket Club, down Richmond Hill and around Mountpleasant Square.
Leinster Square is hardly a square. It is more of a street – or rather two short streets in a T-shape – off Lower Rathmines Road, just a few steps from Rathmines Town Hall and backing onto the lower end of Leinster Road. The earlier, elegant Georgian and Regency houses were built between 1830 and 1843. No 7 was added in 1852 and No 1 around 1877.
The earlier houses on Leinster Square and Prince Arthur Terrace were designed mainly by the Dublin architect, builder and developer John de Courcy Butler. Although Butler’s early life story is not known, he seems to have become a freeman of Dublin as a member of the Bricklayers’ Guild in 1822. He had his offices in the area of Paradise Row (Wellington Street) and Mountjoy Street between 1830 and 1844.
Butler and his neighbour Arthur Williamson realised the potential of developing the Rathmines area in 1830 and leased adjoining pieces of land near the south corner of Rathmines Road and the future Leinster Road. Between 1830 and 1837, they built six houses each on their plots to form Leinster Terrace, and during that time Butler lived at 8 Leinster Terrace and 10 Leinster Terrace.
Meanwhile, in 1835 they had leased two further plots abutting the eastern boundaries of their existing holdings. Butler built Ormond Villa (later Ulster Lodge), where he lived from 1840 to 1843, and Williamson built Berlin Cottage. Butler leased the two adjoining plots to the east of Ormond Villa and Berlin Cottage in 1838, and built Ulster Terrace and Connaught Terrace.
Eventually these developments were renamed Leinster Square and they were renumbered consecutively.
Butler also leased Rookville, a large property beside the south side of the future Leinster Square, in 1841. He lived in the house while he developed the east portion of its grounds fronting Rathmines Road as Ormond Terrace ca 1847.
Finally, around 1851, Butler demolished Rookville and built Prince Arthur Terrace on the west portion of its grounds, laying out a garden between it and Ormond Terrace. Prince Arthur Terrace was designed and developed by Butler in two stages, between 1851 and 1853 and then between 1856 and 1859, when No 7 was added.
Butler lived at 1 Prince Arthur Terrace in 1852, and then moved to Ulster Lodge, 20 Leinster Square, Rathmines, where he lived from 1853 until he died in 1880.
Meanwhile, at the time he was building Ormond Terrace, Butler became a founding Commissioner of Rathmines Township in 1847, and continued to hold office for 28 years. During those years he was also the contractor for Queen's College, Cork, built for the Board of Public Works in 1846-1849. He retired in 1871 and died on 11 February 1880.
Butler’s partner in these developments in Rathmines was the Dublin builder and architect Arthur Williamson, who came from an important Armagh family of architects. Williamson also had family ties with Francis Johnston, and was an executor of Johnston’s will of 1829. His early contracts included working with Thomas Duff at Emo Court in 1822-1831, where they prepared designs for the north and south porticos, for the north front, for the drawing room ceiling and for an ice-house.
Butler and Williamson were neighbours in the Paradise Row and Mountjoy Street area of Dublin when they leased adjoining sites in Rathmines to build the terrace of 12 houses named Leinster Terrace. While Butler built Ormond Villa (later Ulster Lodge), Williamson built Berlin Cottage. The terrace and the two detached houses eventually became part of Leinster Square.
After Williamson died in November 1846, Butler continued to develop Leinster Square and Prince Arthur Terrace.
The numbers of the houses on Leinster Square have changed over the years, but it is interesting to try trace who lived in these houses over the years.
The author and nationalist leader James Stephens (1825-1901) once lived in what is now No 2 Leinster Square.
The poet, journalist and nationalist leader, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903) once lived in No 4. Duffy later emigrated to Australia, became Premier of Victoria, and was knighted. He died in Nice, but was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
The telescope manufacturers, Thomas Grubb (1800-1878), a Quaker from Portlaw, Co Waterford, and his son, Sir Howard Grubb (1844-1931), lived at No 21 and No 23 Leinster Square. The Grubb Telescope Company was built at Observatory Lane, Rathmines, by the Grubbs in the 1860s. World famous, it produced, what was then the largest refracting telescope in the world for the Imperial and Royal Observatory in Vienna. Grubb telescopes are still in use around the world, including those in the observatories in Armagh, Dunsink and Cape Town.
The Greek-born Irish writer Patricio Lafcadio Hearne, who became a Japanese citizen and died as Koizumi Yakumo, spent part of his childhood in homes of his aunt Sarah Brenane on both Leinster Square and Prince Arthur Terrace.
Lafcadio Hearn was the son an Irish father and a Greek mother. He was given his unusual middle name because he was born on 27 June 1859 on the island of Santa Maura, also known as Lefkas, Levkas or Lefkada, in the Ionian Islands. His father, Charles Bush Hearn (1818-1866), from Clara, Co Offaly, was an Irish-born naval surgeon and the grandson of a Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Cashel; his mother was a Greek woman, Rosa Antoniou Kassimatis. They met when Charles Hearn was stationed on the island of Cerigo or Kythira.
The couple eloped and were married in a Greek Orthodox Church on 25 November 1849. Patrick Lefcadio Hearn, their second son, was born on 27 June 1850, and he was baptised Patrikios Lefcadios Hearn (Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν) in Aghia Paraskevi Church.
When his father was reassigned from the Ionian Islands to the West Indies the following year, his mother brought the child to Dublin and they moved into the home of her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Hearn, at 48 Lower Gardiner Street, where she was living with her daughters Susan and Jane.
When Charles Hearn returned to Dublin in October 1853, another child was conceived and was named Daniel James Hearn. However, the marriage collapsed, and when Rosa left Dublin for Kefalonia their marriage was annulled on a technicality.
Rosa later married Giovanni Cavallini, a Greek citizen of Italian descent who became the British-appointed Governor of the tiny island of Antikythera (Cerigotto). She died in Corfu in 1882.
Meanwhile, the young Patrick Lefcadio Hearn had moved into the home of his grandmother’s sister, Sarah Brenane. She was the widow of Captain Justin Brenane and had converted to Roman Catholicism. The child lived with her in Rathmines, first at 30 Leinster Square (1852-1853), which was then numbered 21, and then at 3 Prince Arthur Terrace (1853-1855), before moving on to 73 Upper Leeson Street.
Hearn lived in the US from the age of 19, and wrote widely about New Orleans. However, he is best known for the years he spent in Japan. He moved to Japan in 1890 and adopted the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. He is credited with introducing many Westerners to the life and culture of the Japanese, including their ghost stories, lyric forms, religion and customs. He was one of the first Westerners to translate and appreciate the ancient Japanese form of the haiku.
Lefcadio Hearn died of a heart attack on 26 September 1904 at the age of 54 and he was buried in Zoshigaya Cemetery, Tokyo, after a Buddhist funeral according to the rites of the Jodo Sect of Zen Buddhism at Jitoin Kobudera Temple, Ichigaya.
Apart from his two plaques in Rathmines, there is a another plaque at 73 Upper Leeson Street and a fourth Irish plaque in Dunmore East, Co Waterford, where he spent many childhood holidays.
A labyrinth of laneways runs between and behind Leinster Square and Prince Arthur Terrace, connecting them with Leinster Road, Lower Rathmines Road, Charleville Road, Greenwich Court, Swanville Road and Wynnfield Road.
Long before I was born, my grandfather Stephen Edward Comerford (1867-1921) lived in this part of Dublin after he came back from Thessaloniki in 1916. He had lived much of his life in Beechwood Avenue, Ranelagh, and Old Mountpleasant, beside Mountpleasant Square. But when he returned from Greece in the middle of World War I, he moved into these streets in Rathmines. My father was born in Swanville Place and lived the first years of his childhood in a house between the Stella Cinema and Prince Arthur Terrace, before moving later to Terenure.
When I weas a child, I was told that if I listened carefully I could hear the River Swan flowing beneath the footpaths and coobbles. As I found my way through this part of Rathmines last week, childhood memories returned in clear images but without any logical sequence of playing as a schoolboy in this labyrinth of narrow laneways and alleys that link elegant squares, small terraces and narrow streets.
