The Meade building dynasty in Victorian Dublin and their family roots in Co Limerick

Mount Saint Michael at No 1 Ailesbury Road, Dublin, once the home of the Meade family and Saint Michael’s College

Patrick Comerford

The Meade family was among of the great building contractors and housing developers in Victorian Dublin, developing many of the houses in the Ballsbridge area, and involved in work on some of the great Gothic Revival churches designed by Pugin, Ashlin and McCarthy.

This Dublin ‘dynasty’ of builders and developers traces its roots to Kilcornan, near Askeaton, Co Limerick and to Michael Meade (1814-1886), who was a prominent building contractor from the late 1840s until he died in Dublin in the mid-1880s.

Michael Meade was born ca 1813/1814 in Kilbreedy, between Stonehall and Curraghchase, about 5 km east of Askeaton, Co Limerick.

Meade tfirst rained as a carpenter in the Kilcornan area before moving from Co Limerick to Dublin in his early 20s. In Dublin, he built up his own business, setting up a large sawing, planing and moulding mills in premises on Great Brunswick Street, now Pearse Street.

His business quickly earned a reputation for high-skilled work, and Meade worked from 178 Townsend Street (1847), 17 Westland Row (1853-1858), 152-159 Great Brunswick Street (1863), and 153-159 Great Brunswick Street, ca 1874-ca 1883.

Over three or four decades, Meade and Sons built much of the area between Ballsbridge and Merrion Square. In the 1860s, Meade began developing Ailesbury Road, where he built Shrewsbury House, later the Belgian Embassy, and Mount Saint Michael, later Saint Michael’s College.

Mount Saint Michael, on the corner of Ailesbury Road and Merrion Road, was built ca 1868 became the Meade family home. It was said to have been modelled on Osborne, Queen Victoria’s house on the Isle of Wight.

Meade had taken his son Joseph Michael Meade into partnership by 1871, and around this time Michael Meade became a Justice of the Peace for Dublin.

The Meade family also built many Roman Catholic parish churches designed by Ashlin, Pugin and McCarthy. Their church contracts included the Augustinian Church of Saint Augustine and Saint John the Baptist or ‘John’s Lane Church’ (Pugin and Ashlin, 1862-1874), described by John Ruskin as ‘a poem in stone’, and the church at Mount Argus (McCarthy, 1866-1878), as well as Saint Patrick’s Church, Monkstown (1861), the Church of the Sacred Heart, Donnybrook (1864) and the Church of the Annunciation, Rathfarnham (Ashlin, 1879).

Meade’s other works included the O’Connell Monument and Vault (1851-1869), Glasnevin Cemetery; the Gaeity Theatre, Dublin; Dun Laoghaire Town Hall (1878-1880), designed by John Loftus Robinson (ca 1848-1894) in the style of a Venetian palace; Saint Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital (1863-1866), Galway Road, Ennis, Co Clare; and Saint Colman’s Cathedral (Pugin and Ashlin, 1867-1878), Cobh, Co Cork.

Dún Laoghaire Town Hall, a fine example of the Venetian-style Victorian architecture, designed by JL Robinson and built by Michael Meade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Meade’s reputation survived the potential damage cause by the Phoenix Park murders on 6 May 1882, when the Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Under Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were murdered in Dublin.

The murders were carried out by the ‘Invincibles,’ a dissident Republican faction founded by James Carey (1845-1893), who had been a bricklayer in Meade’s building firm for 18 years.

Michael Meade married his first wife Mary Ann Ryan ca 1837/1838. They were parents of five children:

1, Joseph Michael Meade (1839-1900)
2, Edward John Meade (1840-1907)
3, Michael Thomas Meade (1843-1885), who married (1) Maria Gavin on 29 June 1869, and (2) Annie Hynes.
4, Bridget Meade (born 1845)
5, Daniel O’Connell Meade (1848-1930)

Michael Meade married his second wife Bridget Ashe in 1850. They were parents of:

6, David Peter Ashe Meade (1851-1877)
7, John Francis Meade (1852-1879)
8, Francis Bernard Meade (1856-1882), who lived in New York
9, Thomas Patrick Meade (1858-1933), who lived in England

Michael Meade died on 24 May 1886, aged 72. His second wife Bridget died on 28 July 1886, aged 65. The family vault at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin includes an image of Saint Michael standing guard over Michael Meade and his family.

Saint Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co Cork … built by Michael Meade in 1867-1878 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Michael Meade’s eldest son, Joseph Michael Meade (1839-1900), continued the family’s business of building contractor. He was born in 1839, was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and was a partner in his father’s fast-expanding business, Meade & Son, by 1871.

After his father’s death, Joseph Michael Meade continued to build up the family business until it employed about 900 men. He worked from 153-159 Great Brunswick Street ca 1874 to ca 1883.

He was one of the most significant builders in late Victorian Dublin, and his contracts included the masonry for the Loop Line railway, Bray Catholic church, the Convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor on the South Circular Road, and Guinness’s printing works.

Meade was a Parnellite Nationalist in politics. He was elected to Dublin Corporation on 25 November 1886 as alderman for the Trinity Ward. He was High Sheriff of Dublin in 1889 and Lord Mayor of Dublin twice, in 1891 and 1892. Meade was awarded an honorary doctorate (LL.D) by Trinity College Dublin in 1892 and became a member of the Privy Council for Ireland in 1893.

Meade is credited with first putting forward the idea of inviting Queen Victoria to Ireland for a fourth visit, which took place on 3-27 April 1900.

He was chairman of the Hibernian Bank, and a director of the London Liverpool & Globe Insurance Co, Boland’s Ltd, the Ocean Accident Guarantee Corporation and the Dublin Port and Docks Board. He was also president of the Dublin Master Builders’ Association in the 1890s.

Meade was also a major owner of multi-tenanted tenement buildings in Dublin city. These buildings are now considered to have be ‘slums.’ Many still exist, such as Henrietta Street, but many more were demolished during the 20th century. Yet he also represented Dublin Corporation on a commission set up to inquire into the causes of the high death rate in Dublin.

Meade was married twice. He married (1) in 1870, Katherine Josephine Carvill, a daughter of William Carvill of Rathgar House, Orwell Road (later the Bethany Home, and later the Orwell Lodge Nursing Home), a builder and developer who built large parts of suburban Rathgar; and (2) in 1887, Ada Louise Willis, a daughter of Dr Thomas Willis of Dublin.

Kate and Joseph Meade were the parents of one daughter:

1, Mary Josephine, who married Thomas C Ross on 8 June 1898.

Ada and Joseph Meade were the parents of four children:

2, Thomas George Meade, born 23 January 1888
3, Joseph Michael Meade, born 28 August 1889, a barrister in 1920
4, Kathleen Mary Meade, born in 1891 in the Mansion House, Dublin, when Joseph Meade was Lord Mayor of Dublin
5, Michael Meade, born 31 December 1895

Joseph Meade lived at 153 Rathgar Road ca 1874-1875, at 19 Ailesbury Road (1883), and at Mount Saint Michael, Ailesbury Road, from ca 1896 until his death. He died at home, suddenly, on 14 July 1900, three months after Queen Victoria’s final visit to Ireland, which he had promoted. He was buried three days later at Glasnevin Cemetery, close to the O’Connell Memorial he was involved in building.

Mount Saint Michael at No 1 Ailesbury Road was a substantial property. The house had 21 rooms in 1901, when it was the home of Alderman Joseph Meade’s widow Ada. In the 1940s, the house has become Saint Michael’s College, Ailesbury Road.

Kathleen Mary Meade was born in the Mansion House, Dublin, in 1891 when her father Joseph Meade was Lord Mayor of Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Tales of the Viennese Jews: 17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) … the only great composer before the 20th century to compose a setting in Hebrew of the liturgy for the synagogue

Patrick Comerford

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I decided after my recent visit to Vienna to post occasional blog postings that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

With the attack on Monday night on the Stadttempel, the only surviving pre-war synagogue in Vienna, I have been reminded that Franz Schubert is the only great composer before the 20th century to compose a setting in Hebrew of the liturgy for the synagogue.

A few months before he died in 1828 at the age of 31, Schubert produced a setting in Hebrew of Psalm 92, Tov Lehodot La’Adonai (‘It is good to give thanks to the Lord’), for the Stadttempel Synagogue on Seitenstettengasse in Vienna.

Schubert was born in 1797 and in his short life of 31 years, he composed hundreds of songs, string quartets, sonatas, and ensemble pieces to be played in small, intimate settings.

His career as a composer began at the age of 14, when he created his first surviving vocal work. The intense ‘Hagar’s Lament’ sets a poem about the story in the Book of Genesis about the Hagar who bears a son Ishmael for Abraham, and is sent into exile in the wilderness.

Schubert regularly opened his living quarters and invited musicians and guests to his ‘gatherings,’ in order showcase his new music and that of other composers. Although he was desperately poor, he was a magnet for Viennese classical society, and his evenings were famous.

Schubert was commissioned along with other contemporary composers by Salomon Sulzer, the hazan or cantor who was in charge of singing at Vienna’s main synagogue, the Stadttempel on Seitenstettengasse, for 45 years from 1826 on.

Sultzer had the reputation of having the finest baritone voice of his time and was an influential composer too. His still-familiar settings include Ein Kamocha, Yehalelu Es Shem, and Shema Yisroel. He also edited liturgical music, and he cared deeply about settings in the Hebrew language.

Sultzer was a frequent guest at Schubert’s musical evenings and commissioned Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92. This is a work for a four-part choir and solo baritone and was clearly intended to draw positive attention to Sulzer’s skills. Sulzer sang Schubert’s arrangement at the consecration of the synagogue on 9 April 1826.

The Jewish community had asked Beethoven in 1825 to compose a cantata for the dedication of the Stadttempel. He was unable to accept the commission, although he apparently carried out a preliminary study of Musik der alter Juden, perhaps with this in mind. Instead, the cantata was written by Josef Deschler (1742-1852), a kappelmeister at the Stephansdom, Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, and Franz Schubert wrote his setting of Psalm 92 for the choir of the synagogue.

The musicologist Elaine Brody suggests in Schubert Studies: ‘Sulzer was meticulous in his text-setting; he must have advised Schubert on these matters.’ Schubert could have fulfilled his commission by writing music to a German translation. Instead, he decided to work with the Hebrew language.

Schubert’s Psalm 92 sounds like many of his other melodies and part-songs. Elaine Brody is of the opinion that, stylistically, his setting of Psalm 92 ‘resembles church music more than synagogue music; it displays no characteristic Hebrew melody.’

Psalm 92 was not his only composition to identify with the Jewish people. In 1828, he composed ‘Miriam’s Victory Song,’ setting a poem inspired by the Book of Exodus in which Aaron’s sister rejoices at the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea.

This work was praised by Franz Liszt who heard in at a service at Sulzer’s synagogue before Schubert died in Vienna on 19 November 1828.

The German Catholic composer Joseph Mainzer later wrote that no Viennese church of the time ever offered singing ‘as noble and lofty as that synagogue.’

Because of Schubert’s collaborative work with Sulzer and similar works, German Jews still considered him a friend over a century later. German Jews familiar with his tragic life history saw Schubert as a metaphor for their own suffering. His Psalm 92 and ‘Victory Song’ were performed by the Berlin Jewish Culture League in the 1930s as encouragement to the Jewish community after the Nazis came to power.

An early portrait of Schubert, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, was long denied by Austrian art historians to be Schubert ‘because of the Jewish-looking features.’



Other postings in this series:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.