The next Waterford Archaeological and Historical Society summer outing is on Thursday July 11th when Joe Falvey, our chairperson and well-known local historian, will lead us on a stroll around the Ballygunner and Knockboy area. We will hear about the archaeology and history of this area and hear tales of some of the personalities connected with it.
“Playing at war”? The Waterford National Volunteers, 1914-1917
The next lecture of our 2021-2022 programme will be on Friday, March 25th at 8:00pm in St Patrick’s Gateway Centre, Waterford (Eircode X91 YX61) when historian Prof. David Dickson will deliver a talk titled ‘Eighteenth-Century Waterford: A Singular City?’.
Prof. Dickson’s lecture will begin by reflecting on the emergence of the first cities in eighteenth-century Ireland, distinguishing them from what had come before – walled towns, very modest by European standards, that had been repeatedly shattered in seventeenth-century warfare. In what respects were these new Irish cities similar to what was happening in Britain and Europe? In the second part of the lecture David will look more closely at 'the quays of the kingdom', Cork, Limerick and Waterford, and the common elements in the rise of the three Munster Atlantic ports; he will also touch on the common elements in the social and economic crisis that beset them in the 1820s. The third segment will focus on how far Waterford was an outlier, a singular city, in the history of religious conflict and exclusion that was evident in most Irish cities of the period, and it will explore why this may been the case. The lecture will conclude with a comparison of the evolution of Waterford and Derry, which were each situated on broad-rivers and graced with their first bridges in the 1790s. Both cities were very much influenced by the interventions of their Church of Ireland bishops and, more discreetly, by the shadowy influence of the Beresford family. But was that all?
As
the Boer War ground on into the summer of 1900, the Illustrated London News disdainfully commented on female
volunteers for the nursing service whose ‘capacity for nursing consisted mainly
of their goodwill’. The Illustrated News
however was happy to report that Ireland in particular had ‘yielded a large
company of efficient ladies’ for service in the conflict.[1]
The ladies referred to were professional nurses and the paper ran a studio
portrait of a Mary Anna Davis of Waterford.
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| From the Illustrated London News |
When
Mary Davis became one of a handful of Irish nurses sent to South Africa in 1899,
it was reported that she already had six years’ service in various Irish
hospitals,[2]
and was a member of the Army Nursing Service Reserve.
Whether
or not Nurse Davis thought that she might be called to the colours we will
never know, but she had joined the Army Nursing Service Reserve in 1894.[3] Early
Boer successes in their campaign caused a huge mobilization of British troops
and a subsequent demand for professional nurses. Nurse Davis with a Mary Talbot
and a Sarah J. Caldwell started their journey to Africa from the North Wall in
Dublin on the 29th December 1899.[4]
Nurse
Davis’ war file offers little information on her service in Africa other than a
departure and a return date from the continent. Awards or citations (which
sometimes offer more information) are filed separately; this search was
initially frustrated as none were apparently issued. This discrepancy was
explained by a typographical error – the recipient’s medal roll had mistakenly
been filed under Nurse Anne Mary Davies on the list of Boer War nurses. On the
actual record the details match and show that Nurse Davis was awarded the Queen’s
South Africa (QSA) Medal and the King’s South Africa (KSA) Medal [5].
The
medal roll shows the place of issue, with Nurse Davis’s QSA being issued at Wynberg
General Hospital in 1901.[6]
Wynberg General Hospital was a mixture of canvas and huts and split into three
sections numbering over a thousand beds. Situated on the Cape, Wynberg was near
British Headquarters and was a well-equipped field hospital. The large number
of beds would all be needed as large numbers of the wounded, from battles such
as Belmont and Magersfontein, were brought in through the course of 1900.
The
KSA medal was issued at the general hospital in Kronstad, which was a remote
location adjacent to a contested railway line a world away from Wynberg. The
general hospital here was established in an old Dutch convent with most of the
casualties kept under canvas. In addition to the railway line and field
hospital, a Boer displacement camp was set up at the rail depot. One
commentator who would later succumb to disease himself said there was nothing at
Kronstad ‘except Enteric and Dysentery’.[7]
Another visitor to Kronstad, Lucy Deane, a member of the Boer War Concentration
Camp Commission, stated that Kronstad:
wasn’t a
‘place’, merely a railway centre and storage depot for military supplies, with
acres of bags of meal etc. covered with sail-cloth’. ‘The rest is wide dusty
tracks with spotty camps of various “Corps” of sorts, a tent hospital, tin
shanties, a few seedy bungalows and Wesleyan-Church-looking place, a native
location built entirely out of tin biscuit boxes flattened out and riveted
together, the whole enveloped in a permanent cloud of dust made worse by the
incessant galloping to and fro of men on horse-back[8]
Nurse Davis would serve as a member of the Princess
Christian’s Army Nursing Reserve in Africa until 1909. This organisation had
been disbanded in 1907 and upon her return from Africa applied to join its
successor, the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military
Nursing Service Reserve (QAIMNS). One of the questions on the application asked
had she any experience of dealing with Enteric Fever. Her reply simply stated ‘9
years South Africa’.[9]
On
her return to Britain, Nurse Davis’ would have been awarded the 1914 Star for
her service from the early days of the conflict, she would have also received
the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. Unfortunately her status as a reservist would see her instantly
dismissed from military service after receiving a modest gratuity for her
service. The war records show her living with a cousin in Essex who was
previously listed as her next of kin. Whether she worked in public nursing
during this period is unknown but likely; her military service resumed as a reservist
at Aldershot in February 1914.
Nurse
Davis was dismissed from service on the 8th of May 1914 but rehired again in a
temporary or a reserve function on the 6th of August just a few weeks after the
outbreak of WW1 and by the 17th of the same month was stationed at a field
hospital in France.[10]
Poison gas was introduced onto the Western Front in April 1915 and the Allied Forces
responded quickly to this new threat; by September 1915 Nurse Davis was serving
at a gas clearing station aiding gas victims.[11]
The
last recorded station of Nurse Davis in France was at Villa Tino, which was
part of General Hospital No. 24. Villa Tino was a convalescent unit for sick
nursing sisters and Nurse Davis was stationed here as nurse here rather than a
patient. October 1917 would see Nurse Davis transferred back to Ireland for
service in the George V Military Hospital in Dublin.[12]
Once
again Nurse Davis’ status as a reservist would impact her personal life and her
file contains a brief letter from the head of the QAIMNS stating that she
wouldn’t be entitled to a pension but was owed a gratuity. Her service however
was extended and she agreed to stay on to 1920 and eventual demobilisation.
Nurse
Davis encountered personal issues on her return to Ireland after she was
transferred to Limerick. While in Limerick she penned a letter to the matron of
the QAIMNS complaining that she felt bullied in Limerick by ‘Sinn Feiners’. The
letter also queried her pensionable status and stated that she was intending to
claim disability due to rheumatism. The matron of the QAIMNS sent Nurse Davis a polite but non-committal reply to her plea
for help.
Even years after demobilisation, Nurse Davis’ records contain another brush with the bureaucracy of the War Office. Now a civilian, Ms Davis and a Ms Ritchie Thompson travelled to attend the Royal Jubilee in 1935. Upon her return to Dunmore East where she was now living, she contacted the War Office under the impression that she could reclaim travel expenses. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. This unexpected cost must have been a disappointment to a lady living on limited means.[13]
After
WW1 Nurse Davis had lived with a cousin in England. When this lady became a
widow she came to live with Nurse Davis in Dunmore East until her death in
1940. From local knowledge in Dunmore East it would seem that Nurse Davis was
always happy to lend her medical skills in the community and was very much to
the fore in 1942 when forty-seven survivors from the torpedoed SS Empire Breeze
were landed in Dunmore East.
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| Mary Anna Davis Image from War Records |
However,
the bureaucracy of the War office wasn’t finished with the nurse. Her war
records contain a flurry of letters from the War Disabled Help Department
trying to clarify her status as a military veteran. These letters begin in the
winter of 1958 and into the next year. The purpose of these letters is unknown
but they become increasingly more urgent in nature. It is likely that the
committee was trying to get the elderly Nurse Davis into a military hospital. The attempt would appear to have been
unsuccessful and Nurse Mary Anna Davis died in early 1959.[14]
[1] Illustrated London News, 10 Feb 1900.
[2] Waterford Standard, 30 Dec 1899.
[3] United Kingdom, National Archives, WO/399/2098 (Military file of Nurse Mary Anna Davis).
[4] Irish Times, 30 December 1899.
[5] National Archives, WO/100/229.
[6] Ibid.
[7] John White Aldred, physician,
1876–1901, J.W. Aldred, Boer War diary, 1900. University of Manchester Library.
GB 133 ENG MS 1544.
[8] Papers
of Lucy Anne Evelyn Streatfeild (née Deane), factory inspector and social
worker, 1893–1919. Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. GB 152 LAS.
[9] National Archives, WO/399/2098.
[10] National Archives, WO/399/2098.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] The exact date of death is unknown, and unusually is not marked on the headstone.
Autumn, time to plant some bulbs. Did you know Waterford had its very own Gold Medal daffodils ?
Before the establishment of organised schooling as we know it, which in Ireland started to appear in the second half of the 19th century through the religious orders and the National School system, education was a luxury mostly reserved to the children of those who could afford it, by hiring the services of private tutors. I am not going to delve into the politics of it all, I was only interested in finding out how education was organised in Waterford City at the beginning of the 19th century, based on the information on Public Schools in the newspapers of the time.
Before the formal establishment of schools, various 'Academies' as they called themselves, run privately by a single or several teachers, offered tuition in a variety of subjects for a set fee, paid yearly or quarterly. Some also offered full board. They had to advertise in the local newspapers to get the attention of parents, and sell their skills.
They were located mostly in the city centre, and it is interesting to follow their re-location as better premises become available.
We find Miss Daly in Lady Lane, Mrs Monserrat in Cook Lane, Mr Bacon at the Widow's Apartments, Mr Holden in Peter Street, Mr Cole in Beau Street, The Misses Brown in High Street, Mr Maher in George's Street. Mr Willis starts on Hennessy's Road but soon moves to New Street, etc.
Relocation was sometimes to a more central position, but not always. They have the welfare of their boarders at heart: Mr Frazer having been an assistant at Mr Waters' Grammar school starts his own business and relocates to Stephen Street in January 1792, in a house of
dry and healthy situation, ‘receiving an addition consisting of a large school-room and dormitories in the rear of which there will be an extensive play-ground’
Miss Terresse Lonergan relocates to Great Bridge Street
which situation for Health, Air and Beauty cannot be exceeded, added to the beautiful outlets and the new bridge for the young ladies daily to resort.
The young Masters and Ladies were taught a variety of subjects; for 'a crown per quarter, and a crown entrance' at Mrs Monserrat's
children of 5 years old and upwards will be taught French and English, correctly
Mr Maher specialises in Classical, Mercantile & Mathematics, to which he adds French by 1810.
Given the nature of the accommodation, groups were small, between 8 and 14 pupils maximum.
What about holidays? Mrs Daly leaves it at the discretion of the parents, but most of the others had the vacation time in the month of July or August, again the dates were published by each school in the newspapers.
However that wasn't all.
Examinations took place in December and May, and the results, too were published!
The Russian Cannons in the People’s Park
Over the years, many visitors to the People’s Park of Waterford have curiously wandered over to the pair of cannons situated near the bandstand. Generations of Waterford people have had their photo taken sitting on or beside the cannons – but what exactly do we know about these familiar landmarks? The plaque beside them tells us they were ‘captured in Sebastapol in 1856’ and they have certainly come a long way from the Aleksandrovsk Cannon factory in Russia, where they were made 163 years ago. This is their story.
Every year on Good Friday, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, the ancient ritual of Holy Fire takes place. Unlit candles suddenly burst into flame – some call it a miracle caused by a column of fire coming from Jesus’ tomb, others say it is symbolic instead and white phosphorous is used to create the flames. During the ceremony in 1834, a riot broke out between the Latin Christians and the Eastern Orthodox Christians, which ended with the death of a substantial amount of people. This sparked a debate with the Ottoman Turkish sultan on who should have the keys of the Holy Sepulchre church. Russia, which had been active for years in Jerusalem, was annoyed when Sultan Abdulmejid I gave the keys to the French in 1852 (after a 64 gun French man-of-war warship had sailed to the city of Istanbul). Russia gave the sultan an ultimatum: give the Holy Sepulchre to the true Eastern Orthodox Church, or risk being invaded.
There was a lot more to these rising tensions than one sacred building. The once mighty Ottoman Empire, ruled by Turkey, was losing its grip on power, with the Russian Tsar, Nicholas I calling the empire ‘the sick man of Europe’. France and Britain (though sworn enemies at the time) allied with the Ottoman Empire because they were worried that Russian expansion would damage their trade routes. In July 1853, Russia invaded the part of the Ottoman Empire which today is Romania. As Austrian troops advanced, the Russian troops withdrew and so French and British troops were sent to fight the Russians on the Crimean peninsula and take the city of Sevastopol, home of the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet, which was seen as a threat to the British Navy. There was some irony in this, since the ship yard and docks there were built by a British company.
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| British soldiers serving in Crimea |
The allies landed about thirty miles north of Sevastopol and fought the Battle of Alma shortly after arriving. The Russians were routed totally, but the French troops, unwilling to follow through, let the Russian army escape back to Sevastopol. The fall of the city itself would take another long year and many lives before it did capitulate. East Sevastopol would fall in late 1855 but the war would not end until a peace treat was signed in Paris in 1856.
The Crimean War is perhaps best known for the Lady with the Lamp, the nurse Florence Nightingale, who brought order to the deplorable conditions that the British army allowed war wounded soldiers to be hospitalised in. Less well-known until recent years, but just as tireless and heroic was the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who nursed the wounded men on the battlefield. The two women did meet but they never worked together. The war is also famous for the Charge of the Light Brigade. This was made out to be a heroic sacrifice made by the British cavalry in order to hide the incompetence of the officers in charge: Lord Raglan, Lord Cardigan, Lord Lucan and the French general Armand de Saint-Arnaud (both Lord Raglan and the French Armand de Saint-Arnaud would die in the Crimean). Their incompetent lack of military strategy was very apparent and it brought an end to the nobility’s practice of buying commissions in the army, especially in cavalry regiments. The writing was on the wall for the gallant cavalry charge. A line of troops, facing a cavalry charge, could fire on them with their new 1853 rifle muskets (which had an improved firing rate), devastating the Calvary ranks. During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 the limitations of the cavalry would become very apparent but this lesson was forgotten until WWI, when the great losses were witnessed in cavalry charges against the new modern machine guns in the fields of France in early 1914.
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| Artillery at Sevastopol |
The British and French captured hundreds of cannons in the the southern part of Sevastopol; the Russian were never in a crisis when it came to the replenishment of cannons. The Allies were not going to leave these cannons behind for the Russians, for the terms of the Paris Treaty stated that French, British and Sardinians troop would leave Sevastopol, and return Crimean lands to the Russians. However, the Treaty did allow the victors to take Russian cannons as war trophies. The cost to both the British and French exchequer was a very hard burden for these countries to carry. As for Russia, the cost of the conflict would in time lead Tsar Alexander II to sell the lands of Alaska in October 1867 to the United States for $7.2 million. The British Army shipped all the cannons to the Woolwich arsenal in London. Their haul consisted of 10 bells, about 875 iron cannons, and 177 brass or bronze cannons (the British 89 and the French got 88 respectively). The iron cannons were of no monitory value. Now that they had these cannons, what to do with them?
The French were going to make a Boulevard de Sebastopol and line it with their cannons, like the Moscow Boulevard of 1812 that commemorated Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Russian Army (Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 overture was also written to celebrate this Russian victory). However, most of the Russian cannons in French hands were instead used to make the 22.7m high statue of the Virgin Mary, known as ‘Notre Dame de France’, at Le Puy‐en‐Velay, Auvergne, completed in 1860. Meanwhile the British used the cannons in various projects, most notably John Bell's London Crimean War Memorial, located on Waterloo Place, near Piccadilly, unveiled in 1861. William Theed's 1858 statue of Isaac Newton in the town of Grantham also used melted-down cannons, as did the bronze bell of St Mary's Church, Catherston Lewiston, Dorset, in 1858. The cannons also provided metal for the new Victoria Cross medals. Now the highest award of the British Army, it was created on the orders of Queen Victoria to commemorate outstanding acts of bravery shown by soldiers in the Crimean War.
The British government came out with another way of disposing of this war trophy: a small number of iron ordnance were granted to cities or towns in Great Britain and Ireland that had proper public places to put them in. Waterford city was quick to take up this offer. In May 1857, the then Mayor of Waterford, John Aloysius Blake, wrote to the War Department, requesting cannons from the Crimean War to decorate the city’s new park. Two cannons were sent over on the steamer ‘Citizen’, but they didn’t have gun carriages, only an accompanying price list for different types of gun carriages. The Mayor, who was also the MP for Waterford and was in England, made a visit to the arsenal at Woolwich, found two he thought suitable, and got permission from the War Office to ship them over to Waterford.
The Waterford cannons are 24–pound (152 mm) short 1804 cannon. These guns were made in 1828 at the Aleksandrovsk cannon factory (which is now the Russian city of Petrozavodsk). The plant was founded in 1703 at the direction of Emperor Peter I and was engaged in the production of cast-iron naval cannons. On one side of the trunnions of the Waterford cannons is the name of the plant’s director for that period, Alexander Andreevich Fullon (he ran the plant from 1819 to 1833). On the other side of the trunnions, is the serial number (21192), its weight (120 pounds, approximately 1960 kilograms). The letters ‘MA’ on the Waterford cannons denote the term ‘naval artillery’. Such stamps were placed on the guns that armed the warships. Being naval guns, could these cannons have been on a Russian warship during the Battle of Sinope in 1853? This cannot be confirmed but the cannons would have been removed from their ship to firstly, protect the fortress at Sevastopol and secondly, to stop them from being sunk along with their ship by the powerful British Navy. As for the damage on the trunk of one of the Waterford cannons, without a special analysis, it cannot be said with certainty that this damage is from the splinters of shells or bullets.
To create these cannons, first a three-dimensional mould of the cannon would be made from wood. This would have been put in a steel clay box and moulding clay would be added to make the shape of the cannon. Molten iron would be poured in to these vertical moulds, to form the solid iron cannon (vertical line of cannon mould would be place below the smelter; when smelter was untapped the molten iron would have flowed directly into the moulds). The mould would be broken open and the casted cannon would be cleaned for the next process: lathing. It would be set up on the lathe, the cannon would be drilled out, then, using a boring bar, it would be bored the right size for the cannon ball, in this case 6 inches. The machine tools used to rifle bores (that is, to create spiral grooves inside the barrel, which spin the bullet or ball, and make the aim accurate for a longer distance) made all front-loaded muzzled smoothbore guns (without spirals) obsolete; this happened around 1860 with the introduction of the breach-loaded gun. Unlike front-loaded guns, breech-loaded guns had their bullets inserted from the back of the gun. Barrel rifling was invented in Augsburg, Germany in 1498. In 1520 August Kotter, an armourer from Nuremberg, improved upon this work. Though true rifling dates from the mid-sixteenth century, it did not become commonplace until the nineteenth century.
These cannons are not Waterford’s sole connection to the Crimean War: Irish soldiers fought and lost their lives in the war as well. The Irish Garrison Towns blog tells the tale of one Waterford man who survived the war but ended his days in Waterford’s workhouse. When Patrick Hanlon died aged 83 in 1909, his coffin was placed on a gun carriage and buried with military honours in St Mary’s churchyard. Hanlon was a veteran of the Crimean War, so the Veteran’s Relief Fund paid for the funeral after the workhouse master, Mr Cosgrave, notified the War Office of his death. ‘Thus an elderly man who died a pauper was buried as a soldier.’
So, the cannon that we all love and have kind memories of have great memories of their own. These wonderful pieces of war memorabilia will be with us for many years to come and no doubt plenty of pictures will still be taken next to the guns.
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| First lecture 'on home turf', 2015 |
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| NUI Galway |
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| The Bull Post on the Hill of Ballybricken, Waterford City |
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| Blue Plaque to Paddy Coad, Doyle Street, Waterford City |
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| Statue of a Pikeman, Wexford |
Waterford port and harbour between 1815 and 1842 evolved in a milieu where political and civic positions were the preserve of the Protestant elite. However, it was also a society in transition, with Catholics succeeding in mercantile and industrial enterprises, becoming increasingly confident and demanding a right to a role in politics and civic institutions. [2]
