28 December 2023

An old Quaker house
in Harold’s Cross is
rebuilt after decades
of decay and neglect

No 201 Harold’s Cross Road, the birthplace of the Quaker abolitionist and philanthropist Richard Allen (1803–1886), is now being restored (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

For more than ten years, I have written about the sad and sorry state of No 201 Harold’s Cross Road, an important part of the architectural heritage of the Rathmines and Harold’s Cross area of south Dublin and an integral part of the history of Quakers and the story of Irish philanthropy.

In recent months, however, a number of new comments on these posts, dating back to 2013, alerted me to the restoration work now being carried out on this important building.

So, during my pre-Christmas visit to Dublin earlier last week, as I was strolling around Rathmines and Harold’s Cross, I decided to see the work myself, and I was delighted to see how the house is being rescued and restored.

Countless efforts have been made in recent years to have the complete building classified as a Protected Structure, and to ensure the protection of the railings and plinth wall in front.

Back in March and August 2015, I wrote about the sad neglect and decay of this house, pointing out that this was part of local history was in danger of being lost. Looking at the house from the street then, the surviving 18th century features included the blocked front doorcase. But the windows were boarded up and it looked derelict, the front garden was overgrown, and there was an overpowering sense that the whole site was being neglected.

The only apparent change during that five-month period eight years ago was the addition of garish whitewash that was used to cover up graffiti on the walls. But that had simply defaced the attractive symmetry of the red-brick façade of the house.

No 201 Harold’s Cross Road in 2015 … whitewash covered up graffiti and defaced the attractive symmetry of the red-brick façade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

No 201 Harold’s Cross Road is a large red-brick building dating from 1750, and it appears on Rocque’s maps of 1756 and 1760. It was there the Quaker abolitionist and philanthropist Richard Allen (1803-1886) was born on 8 January 1803.

The story of the Allen family is told in detail by Clive Allen in his 2007 book The Allens, Family and Friends, ten generations of Quaker ancestry.

When Richard Allen was born in this house in Harold’s Cross, it was the summer home of his parents, Edward and Ellen Allen. Edward Weston Allen (1765-1848) was a linen merchant and wholesale draper. In 1798, he married Eleanor ‘Ellen’ Barrington (1776-1819), descended from an old Quaker family from Co Wexford.

Edward and Ellen Allen lived at 102 Saint James’s Street, and later at 22 Upper Bridge Street. But in the summer months they lived in this house in Harold’s Cross, which was then a rural area.

Edward was a founding member of the Cork Street Fever Hospital, the Dublin Institution, and other charitable foundations. Towards the end of his life, Edward Allen moved to a house named Mountain View near Churchtown, where he died in 1848 at the age of 82. Although he had long stopped attending Quaker meetings and had left the Society of Friends, he was buried in Friends’ Burial Ground in Cork Street, Dublin.

In all, Edward and Ellen Allen had 15 children. Their second son, Richard Allen, was born in the house in Harold’s Cross on 8 January 1803, and like some of his brothers and sisters he was educated there privately by a tutor. At the age of 17, he joined the family business in Bridge Street.

Although his father had been asked to leave the Society of Friends, Richard was an active Quaker, and in 1828 he married into another Quaker merchant dynasty when he married Anne Webb. But they never lived at the house in Harold’s Cross, living instead at Ellis Quay, and later at High Street, Dublin. He also had shops opposite the GPO in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, and in Patrick Street, Cork.

He was active in the movement for the abolition of slavery, took part in many anti-slavery conferences in London and lobbied parliament for more effective legislation outlawing the slave trade. He attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the other Irish delegates including Daniel O’Connell and the historian Richard Robert Madden.

His commitment to the anti-slavery movement became a financial risk to his business, and he also became involved in movements for prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty.

His friends and wider circle included the freed slave Frederick Douglass, the American publisher William Lloyd Garrison, the temperance campaigner Father Theobald Mathew, the Dublin-born philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo, and the poet and balladeer Thomas Moore.

He later lived at De Vesci Lodge in Monkstown and then at Brooklawn in Blackrock, Co Dublin, where he died in 1886.

The story of the Allen family is told by Clive Allen in his 2007 book

By 1870, the former Allen family home in Harold’s Cross had become a ‘Female Orphanage,’ known as Westbank Orphanage or the Protestant Girls’ Orphanage. A a small central path leading to the front door and an extended north range (now No 199) with a Post Office. The main building was still marked on maps as an orphanage in 1936. By then the north range was rebuilt. The shop I remember from my childhood as Healy’s grocery shop closed in recent years and was derelict by 2013.

Ten years ago, back in 2013, I asked whether we are about to lose another piece of Dublin’s architectural heritage. Nothing was done in the years that followed, and the condition of the house continued to deteriorate.

Harold’s Cross is a Dublin 6 suburb with a lot going for it. It has good cafés, an interesting social mix of housing, from artisan cottages at Harold’s Cross Bridge to the elegant Victorian houses and villas on Leinster Road and Kenilworth Square.

People living in Harold’s Cross may bemoan the loss of the Kenilworth Cinema in recent decades, and the fact there is no major supermarket in the area. But the loss of this house, probably the oldest surviving building in the village, would have done far greater damage to the architectural heritage and character of Harold’s Cross.

Under the Dublin City Development Plan the entire site is now zoned Z1 ‘to protect, provide and improve residential amenities.’ Dublin City Council granted permission in 2019 for the refurbishment and construction of 12 apartments in house, including seven apartments in the house and five apartments in two linked three-storey residential blocks replacing the industrial unit. The plan includes a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments and a new pedestrian entrance from Leinster Place, off Leinster Road.

The site of 199, 201 & 201A Harold’s Cross Road, covering 0.07 hectares (0.16 acres), including the three-storey house, a two-storey extension and a dilapidated industrial unit or warehouse to the rear, was sold recently through Knight Frank.

Today, the site is closed off from public view and covered in builders’ cladding and scaffolding. But was good to catch a glimpse of the house last week, and to be assured that it is being restored appropriately.

No 201 Harold’s Cross Road in 2013 … then a neglected and decaying part of 18th century heritage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Daily prayers during
the 12 Days of Christmas:
4, 28 December 2023

‘Four colly birds on the Fourth Day of Christmas … the four evangelists depicted in the the East Window in Roscarberrry Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Today is the Fourth Day of Christmas and the Church Calendar today remembers the Holy Innocents (28 December 2023).

Before today begins, I am taking some time for reading, reflection and prayer.

My reflections each morning during the ‘12 Days of Christmas’ are following this pattern:

1, A reflection on a verse from the popular Christmas song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’;

2, the Gospel reading of the day;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

‘Four colly birds’ … symbols of the Four Evangelists in a window in Saint Mary’s Church, Badby, Northamptonshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The 12 Days of Christmas: 4, Four Colly Birds:

The Fourth Day of Christmas, 28 December, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Book of Common Prayer, and is known in some places as ‘Childermass.’ The story of the Holy Innocents is one of the most poignant stories in the Bible: ‘Rachel weeping for her children … because they are no more.’

I had lost my innocence by late teens: by 19, I was trying to break out as a freelance journalist in England with the Lichfield Mercury, wondering whether I should give up the ‘day job’ as a trainee chartered surveyor; by the age of 20, I had my own flat in Wexford, where I was working as a staff journalist with the Wexford People. I remember one Christmas in Wexford in those days of the 1970s how the late Maurice Sinnott suggested that this day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, would be a good day for the Churches to recall the victims of war, particularly the children who had been killed by the Hiroshima bomb.

Holy Innocents’ Day is being marked later today by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship with an online gathering. Along with links to what is happening in 2023, the gathering will also look at some of the wider issues, including an input from Canada about the victims of residential schools and child refugees around so many conflicts. Malcolm Guite will be reading his sonnet, ‘Refugee’, and there will be a video update from Sudan following attacks on 19 December.

Oscar Schindler famously said: ‘Whoever saves the life of one saves the entire world.’ He was referring to a well-known teaching in the Talmud: ‘Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world’ (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4: 8, 37a). It is a teaching that has inspired the inscription on medals awarded to the Righteous Gentiles, those brave people who risked their own lives to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust: ‘Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved the whole world.’

The obvious deduction from that, of course, is: Whoever destroys the innocence of one child, it is as if he has destroyed the innocence of all children, as if he has destroyed the childhood of everyone. It is for this reason that Jesus reserves his most severe and most frightening warning and rebuke for those sort of people (see Mark 9: 42; Luke 17: 2).

This is an appropriate day to remember those children whose innocence has been destroyed this year by war in Gaza, Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine and Russia, in forgotten wars, by poverty and by the cruelty of governments who think refugees, asylum seekers and their children are mere commodities to be exported to Rwanda or locked away in decrepit and inhumane accommodation.

But this is a good day too to give thanks for the children in our lives, whether in our own families or in the larger family of the Church. And it is a good day to revive the ancient custom of parents blessing their children at the end of the day as part of their nightly prayers.

The fourth verse of the traditional song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ is:

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me …
four colly birds,
three French hens,
two turtle doves
and a partridge in a pear tree.


Colly birds were blackbirds, but the Christian interpretation of this song often describes them as ‘calling birds’ so that they come to represent the Four Evangelists or the Four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

‘The Killing of the Holy Innocents’ by Giotto (ca 1304-1306) in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua … 28 December is marked in the Church Calendar as the feast day of the Holy Innocents (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 2: 13-18 (NRSVA):

13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’

16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

18 ‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’

John Hutton’s ‘Screen of Saints and Angels’ at the entrance to Coventry Cathedral ... the Coventry Carol, dating from the 16th century, recalls the story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Thursday 28 December 2023, the Holy Innocents):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Love at Advent and Christmas.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (28 December 2023, The Holy Innocents) invites us to pray in these words:

On this day, may we cherish our young people and provide them with the guidance and knowledge to navigate our complex and challenging world.

The Collect:

Heavenly Father,
whose children suffered at the hands of Herod,
though they had done no wrong:
by the suffering of your Son
and by the innocence of our lives
frustrate all evil designs
and establish your reign of justice and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ,
in your humility you have stooped to share our human life
with the most defenceless of your children:
may we who have received these gifts of your passion
rejoice in celebrating the witness of the Holy Innocents
to the purity of your sacrifice
made once for all upon the cross;
for you are alive and reign, now and for ever.

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

Images of the Four Evangelists on the carved altar in Church of the Assumption, Moyvane, Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org