14 June 2017

Shannon Rowing Club: an
inspiration for Limerick’s
Edwardian architecture

Shannon Rowing Club … an inspiration for Edwardian and Art Nouveau architecture in Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Limerick is defined by the River Shannon, which runs majestically through the city. The river is the core of the city, and as I regularly wait for a bus on Arthur’s Quay, enjoying the river, with views to my right of the Island, with Saint Mary’s Cathedral, King John’s Castle, Saint Munchin’s Church and Thomond Bridge, while to my left are many of the modern buildings lining Limerick’s Quays, Sarsfield Bridge and the delightful Arts and Crafts-style Edwardian clubhouse of Shannon Rowing Club.

The highly elaborate clubhouse stands out, not only for its architectural beauty, but because of its location on an artificial island between a canal and the River Shannon, connected to Sarsfield Bridge.

Sarsfield Bridge was originally named Wellesley Bridge in honour of the Duke of Wellington, and the island on which the clubhouse stands is known as Shannon Island or Wellesley Pier.

Shannon Rowing Club, the oldest rowing club in Limerick City, was founded in 1866 by Sir Peter Tait, the Limerick entrepreneur who is remembered on the city streets in the Tait Clock in Baker Place. Last year, the club celebrated its 150th anniversary [2016].

Shannon Rowing Club with Saint Mary’s Cathedral in the background (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

In 1902, an inventive young English architect, William Clifford Smith (1881-1954), won an international competition to design a new clubhouse. The new clubhouse was built by Messrs Gough at a cost of £2,000 and was completed in 1905.

This is a highly elaborate clubhouse in the Edwardian Arts and Crafts idiom. This is such a fine example of Edwardian architecture that, as far as I know, it is the only listed sports building in Ireland.

This detached two-bay, two-storey over basement stone clubhouse stands on a limestone pier to the north-east of Sarsfield Bridge, with a limestone entrance platform bridging at basement level. The variation of the windows, the contrasting façade finishes at each level, and the large-scale massing of the building with its gables, bays and balconies are some of the attractive features in a building that is still in an impeccable condition.

Clifford Smith’s attention to detail is seen in the Art Nouveau repousée metal finger plates on the interior doors. Among his attractive features are the asymmetry of the building, and the corbels, brackets, arches and columns.

Shannon Rowing Club stands on an artificial island in the river in the heart of Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

William Clifford Smith was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1881 or 1882. In 1901, at the age of 19, he was an architect’s pupil and still living in Poole with his parents, Lucy and John C Smith, a draper.

On winning the competition, Clifford Smith decided to stay to Ireland and he settled in Limerick. In 1906, he designed a terrace of small dormered cottages at Fair Green in Adare, Co Limerick, for the 4th Earl of Dunraven. In 1907, Dunraven also invited Clifford Smith to design the Village Hall and Clubhouse in Adare in the Arts and Crafts style.

Around 1910, Clifford Smith designed the former Bank and Post Office in Foynes, Co Limerick, the only building to be completed as part of the vision of Inigo Thomas for a Market Square in Foynes, and Creeven Cottages, a row of cottages at the east end of Foynes.

The Shannon Rowing Club gave impetus to an Edwardian freestyle that marked out the building on Limerick’s riverscape. It is a style that can be seen too throughout the city in suburban houses in Ennis Road, O’Connell Avenue and Shelbourne Road.

Some of these houses are three-storied with an assortment of balconettes, oculi and timbered gables. Others have horizontal mullioned windows, and steep roofs with prominent chimney stacks, which owe much to the Arts and Crafts style. Contrasting materials were also carefully chosen – brick, limestone and pebbledash – combined with Art Nouveau-inspired cast-iron railings.

The Belltable Theatre … the former cinema in O’Connell Street was remodelled by William Clifford Smith (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

By 1911, Clifford Smith was boarding in the home of Elizabeth McCarthy on Ennis Road. He may have served in the Royal Engineers during World War I. But he returned to Limerick after the war, and in 1919 he designed what is now the Belltable Arts Centre at 69 O’Connell Street.

This was the Coliseum Theatre and then the Gaiety Cinema. The former Georgian townhouse was substantially remodelled at ground floor level to accommodate a theatre in the late 19th century, and in the 20th century it became one of the most important venues in Limerick for the performing arts.

The former townhouse is one of the larger three-bay houses in a terrace of 11 houses between Hartstonge Street and Mallow Street, and which has been described as ‘one of the most noble street elevations in the city.’

Clifford Smith designed the limestone front at ground floor level with panache and without compromising the uniform quality of the streetscape. The façade continues to retain his bold elliptical arch and mannered columns.

Clifford Smith worked from 75 O'Connell Street for much of his career. In 1928, he formed a partnership with Edward Newenham, known as Clifford Smith & Newenham.

William Clifford Smith lived at Northesk, Lansdowne, Limerick, from before 1937, when his daughter Doreen married Charles Johnston, until he died in 1954. Clifford Smith & Newenham amalgamated with the Dublin practice of Dermot Mulligan in 1968 to become Newenham Mulligan & Associates.

A Pugin-style church in
Ballybunion built by
a tea planter’s widow

Saint John’s Church, Church Road, Ballybunion … one of two Pugin-style churches in Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

During my few hours in Ballybunion, Co Kerry, which is at the western end of this group of parishes, I visited Saint John’s Church on Church Road at the weekend. Some weeks earlier, I had visited Saint Augustine’s Church, the former Church of Ireland parish church which now serves the coastal resort town as a library. So, a visit to Saint John’s was appropriate late on Saturday afternoon [10 June 2017] after a walk on the beach and along the cliffs.

Saint John’s Church dates from an era that was strongly influenced by AWN Pugin and the Gothic Revival in church architecture. This one of only two churches from this school in Co Kerry, the other being Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Killarney, making it one of the architecturally important churches in Kerry.

The funds for building this neo-Gothic church were donated by Mrs Mary Young in memory of her husband, John Young. Mary Young (nee O’Malley) was born in Kilconly, Ballybunion. She met her husband John Young, a tea planter, while she was working in Kilkee, Co Clare.

When John Young died, Mary Young inherited his considerable wealth. She used much of her wealth to finance building the convent in Ballybunion in 1887, Ballybunion House, and Saint John’s Church, which cost £8,500.

The church was designed in 1892 by the Dublin-based architect George Coppinger Ashlin (1837-1921). Building began in 1894, but Mary Young died later that year before the church was completed, and she is buried with her husband in Kilehenny Cemetery. The first Mass in the church was celebrated on 6 August 1897, when Saint John’s was completed.

Inside Saint John’s Church, Ballybunion, designed by George Coppinger Ashlin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

This is single-height and double-height Gothic Revival style church, with a seven-bay, double-height nave, and with seven-bay single-storey lean-to aisles to the north and south sides. There is a two-bay, single-storey sacristy projection to the north-east corner, a single-bay, two-stage engaged truncated tower to the south-west corner on a square plan, stepped buttresses and an entrance bay to west gable.

There are pitched slate roofs with lean-to slate roofs to the aisles, a clay ridge comb, gable parapets with ashlar copings, finials and springers, a cast-iron profiled gutter on an ashlar corbel table, and cast-iron hoppers and downpipes.

The church walls are built with rock-hewn squared limestone, with smooth ashlar dressings. The paired lancets to the side walls have limestone surrounds.

The west window and organ gallery in Saint John’s Church, Ballybunion (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

There are large tracery windows at the east and west ends. The west window incorporates a rose window of cinquefoils, and there is a west gallery. The pointed arches to the doorways have stepped reveals, hood mouldings and doors are timber ledged-and-braced double-leaf doors.

The pointed arcades to the aisles rest on polished pink granite and limestone columns. There are exposed scissor trusses to the nave.

The main altar and the side altars each have a reredos with carved pinnacles. There are tiled floors in the chancel and in the side chapels, and decorative tiling in the nave.

The architect who designed the church was AWN Pugin’s son-in-law, George Coppinger Ashlin, a son of John Musson Ashlin, of Rush Hill, Wandsworth, and his wife Dorinda Coppinger. He was born at Carrigrenane House, Co Cork, on 28 May 1837. He was educated at the College of St Servais, Liège, and Oscott College (1851-1855), near Birmingham, where he appears already to have started preparing for a career in architecture.

In 1856, Ashlin became a pupil of Pugin’s son, Edward Welby Pugin, first in Birmingham and then in London, and then studied at the Royal Academy (1858-1860). When he completed his articles, Ashlin was taken into partnership by Pugin, who gave him the responsibility of establishing a Dublin branch of the practice and taking charge of the Irish commissions. At the time, these Irish commissions included the new church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Cork.

By early 1861, Ashlin had opened the Dublin office of Pugin & Ashlin at 90 Saint Stephen’s Green. Many commissions followed, almost all of them for churches, convents and monasteries, including the new cathedral at Queenstown (Cobh), Co Cork, as well as the Portrane Hospital.

The partnership of Pugin & Ashlin was dissolved in 1868. A year earlier, in 1867, Ashlin had married Edward Pugin’s younger sister Mary Pugin (1844-1933). The family ties remained close, and Ashlin may have been in partnership with his brothers-in-law, Peter Paul Pugin and Cuthbert Pugin, around 1875-1880, although he worked under his own name in Ireland.

The octagonal baptismal font in Saint John’s Church was designed by Ashlin and Coleman in 1912 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

In 1903, his former pupil and office manager, Thomas Aloysius Coleman, a cousin of my great uncle, Francis Coleman (1854-1922), joined Ashlin in the new partnership of Ashlin & Coleman. His other pupils and assistants included Thomas Joseph Cullen (1879-1947), who lived in his later years at Sally Park, Firhouse.

The octagonal baptismal font in Saint John’s Church, Ballybunion, was designed by Ashlin and Coleman in 1912.

Ashlin was active in the architectural profession, and was a fellow (FRIAI, 1865), council member and president of the RIAI (1902-1904), a fellow of the RIBA (FRIBA, 1899), and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). He died, aged 84, on 10 December 1921, at Saint George’s, Killiney, the house he designed for himself, and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

The mosaic sanctuary floor in Saint John’s is the work of Ludwig Oppenheimer of Manchester (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

The mosaic sanctuary floor in Saint John’s dates from 1915 and is the work of the mosaic firm established in Manchester by Ludwig Oppenheimer. This partnership of mosaic artists, based in Old Trafford, had a close working relationship with Ashlin & Coleman and decorated many buildings, mainly churches, in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1960s.

The founder of the firm, Ludwig Oppenheimer, was born into an Orthodox Jewish merchant banking family in Brunswick, Germany, in 1830. He was sent to Manchester to improve his English. There he fell in love with Susan McCulloch, the niece of the Scottish couple he had his lodgings and converted to Christianity.

After he was disowned by his parents, he became an apprentice mosaicist in Venice. He returned to Manchester to marry Susan and to establish his mosaics business in the city in 1865. This family business continued in Manchester until 1965, when, it eventually closed, full century after its foundation.

Major renovations were carried out in Saint John’s Church in recent years, including the restoration of the stained-glass windows which had become buckled over the decades.

The great East Window in Saint John’s Church, Ballybunion (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)