A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  Cameron does not appear to have allowed his politics to interfere with his duties. He enjoyed a good working relationship with councillors of all political complexions as well as with professional colleagues. When Kathleen Lynn was arrested in October 1918 because of her membership of the executive committee of Sinn Féin he joined with the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, in securing her release in recognition of the important work she was doing in combating the influenza pandemic and raising public awareness of health issues.

  In many respects Cameron was not far from being indispensable. After his death the corporation ceased publishing quarterly health breviates—a retrograde step with regard to collating information and identifying important social as well as health trends. This had serious implications for policy planning. If he often expressed nostalgia for the long-departed nobility who had populated the city of his youth, he also welcomed the emergence of trade unions to champion workers’ rights.14 In short, he represented much of what was best in Dublin’s liberal unionist tradition.

  The greatest impact of the flu pandemic was among the poor. The fate of the Phelan family in Corporation Buildings was unusual only in that it took them all. On Saturday 22 February 1919, not having seen them for some days, neighbours forced the door of their flat. The mother was dead in the bed. Her husband and their daughter were lying beside her, too weak to move. Mrs Phelan’s sister lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, also unable to move. They were brought to the Dublin Union hospital, where all died within a few hours.

  The influenza pandemic obscured a greater long-term health threat for Dubliners from the prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases that had been bred for generations by the poverty of the slums. In 1914 deaths from the main sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, gonorrhoea and phagedaena, were 1.4 per 10,000, compared with 0.51 in Belfast and 0.76 in London. STD-related deaths, especially those of infants, were often attributed to other causes.15

  Even before the war began these closely linked problems had assumed social and political dimensions. The British army had been regarded as the main source of the problem for decades, and public figures who agreed on very little else, such as Arthur Griffith and Jim Larkin, routinely denounced soldiers as the despoilers of Irish maidenhood.

  There had been improvements over the years. There was a marked decline in the number of arrests for prostitution from the 1890s onwards, when the advent of large-scale factory employment for women in enterprises such as Jacob’s began providing alternative sources of income. By the early 1900s the number of prostitutes in the city was reckoned to have fallen by three-quarters, though the DMP estimated that there were still 1,677—about 2 per cent of the city’s female population.16

  A ‘white slavery’ scare in the years immediately before the war brought renewed interest in the problems of prostitution, sexual mores and disease. Groups expressing concern included conservative Catholic nationalists, for whom it was the most sordid manifestation of English materialism and its power to corrupt traditional Irish values, as well as feminists fighting for the dignity of women and for equality. The two strands were brought together in the person of Alice Abadan of the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, who made well-publicised tours of Ireland in 1912 and 1913. More than a thousand women attended her meeting in Dublin in 1912 to hear her denounce the evils of ‘white slavery’, and many people supported the demand that the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill (1912) should include Ireland in its remit. Fears that the country would be excluded from the legislation appear to have been unfounded, but they gave added momentum to the campaign for women’s rights in general. As Abadan reminded her audience on her return trip to Dublin in early 1913, ‘where there was one slavery, there were many.’

  The outbreak of war brought with it more soldiers, Irish and British, and with the deluge of uniforms on the streets came renewed concern for the morals and health of Irish women.

  Table 17

  Prosecutions of brothel-keepers and prostitutes, 1912–19

  The anxiety of feminists and nationalists would be shared by the military authorities, which helps explain the vigour of the DMP’s crackdown on brothels. The absence of any prosecutions in the year preceding the outbreak of the war is easily explained by the lock-out, as is the dramatic falling off in arrests of women for soliciting, because police resources were fully stretched in the second half of the year in dealing with labour unrest. Once the war began, and especially from 1915 onwards, there was a considerable increase in the number of prosecutions of brothel-keepers.

  The temporary increase in the number of arrests for soliciting on the streets in 1915 probably reflects the suppression of the brothels. The DMP could also use new powers under the Defence of the Realm Act to arrest women they suspected of having sexually transmitted disease in order to prevent them infecting soldiers.

  At the same time voices as varied as the advanced nationalist journal Hibernian and the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Bernard, expressed concern over the corrupting influence of the military on Irish recruits. The Hibernian warned that

  conscription leads to immorality … It has happened too often that decent young Irishmen removed from the restraint of home life, and placed in the corrupting surroundings of a barracks, have taken to drink and got into the habit of keeping company with the unfortunate women who are found wherever soldiers are stationed.

  Dr Bernard bewailed the fact that it was impossible to police the situation, as there were hundreds of single women living in single rooms in Dublin. The view that single women living alone could become prostitutes and ‘contaminate the other respectable women living in the house’ worried churchmen of all denominations. The Catholic Primate, Cardinal Logue, asked rhetorically, ‘Shall we allow the brightest jewel in the crown of Ireland to be wrested from her?’ And the revolutionary socialist James Connolly told the authorities: ‘If you want to make Dublin clean in its moral standards remove your garrison.’17 At the other end of the social spectrum Lady Fingall organised a committee to establish a hostel for young domestic servants who were between jobs, where they could live free from the risk of contamination by vice.18

  Two days after Lady Fingall told a meeting of the Catholic Truth Society in the Mansion House that ‘the state of the City of Dublin and its suburbs at night are a disgrace to Christianity and above all a disgrace to Catholic Ireland,’ P. T. Daly was relating to fellow-members of the corporation that fathers in his constituency could not let ‘the females of their families’ go out after nightfall in the area between the Custom House and the end of the North Wall. ‘The immorality that is going on is scandalous.’ He was ‘informed that the men responsible were not Dublin men,’ and stated that if the police did not do their duty others would. ‘I do not want to see bloodshed, but I may tell you that a vigilance committee is being formed, and it will be stopped once for all.’19

  The Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association had already launched its own patrols under the leadership of its redoubtable founder and driving force, then eighty-six years old, Anna Haslam. A Quaker by religion and unionist in politics, she had no difficulty taking the initiative in conjunction with the National Union of Women Workers in Britain and the Chief Secretary’s Office. The patrols were made up of women, usually working in pairs, who policed what were considered the worst areas, from Sackville Street eastwards along the quays and into P. T. Daly’s North Wall area. They were usually accompanied by plain-clothes DMP constables. The association was affiliated to the National Union of Women Workers, whose support for the war effort did not lessen its commitment to advancing women’s rights through trade union organising and educational, political and philanthropic activities.

  In the same week that the Weekly Irish Times published the speeches by Lady Fingall and P. T. Daly a member of the women’s patrol said she was ‘aghast at the scenes my night walks have shown me.’ She normally patrolled from 9:30 until 11:30 p.m., when Sackville Street

  a
ppears to be one great, low saloon, where young girls, soldiers, sailors and civilians loiter about. It goes to one’s heart to see how very young most of the girls are; also how drunk many of them are. They accost one another without apparently any shame, and more times than I can count have I turned my flashlight on to dark doorways and corners in laneways and disclosed scenes that are indescribable.

  The culprits were ‘too cute’ for the police to catch them. ‘We try to impress these poor girls with the fact that we are their friends and out in their interests, but it is very hard.’ Some of them ‘are quite gentle,’ but

  more often they give us great abuse and they have even raised their hands to us. The drunken ones are particularly hard to deal with.

  The men included many foreign sailors but also well-dressed locals. Nor was economic need the only imperative.

  Factory girls that I know do not care to go to their miserable homes till bedtime; so they frequent the streets, where mischief is just waiting for them. The filthy, ill-lighted, uncared for, and unprotected laneways in the city are veritable nurseries of evil.

  This type of activity allowed suffrage campaigners and feminists generally to raise the issue of women’s rights and the vulnerability of children in such circumstances. The Irish Worker, on the other hand, had no time for the ‘new form of inquisition’ by ‘a number of ladies to interfere with the lives of the poor, to boss, to direct, to control and … keep in subjection … their poorer sisters.’ Over time, however, the women won grudging admiration, even from their critics, for their courage and their determination to prosecute men who used prostitutes, including ‘suburban swanks,’ thus seeking to redress the traditional attitude that dissolute women were the cause of the problem. If they were not particularly successful this was mainly due to the prevailing attitudes among the DMP and police magistrates.

  Although their numbers were tiny, the publicity these patrols generated raised public awareness of the problem, and by January 1916 a Dublin Watch Committee had been set up, with sub-committees to tackle drunkenness, vice, immorality, moneylending, gambling, child abuse and, in early 1917, sexually transmitted disease. Later in 1917 the women’s patrols were incorporated in the DMP, with eight paid full-time workers.

  As the war dragged on, a consensus would emerge that drew together different strands of opinion that shared concerns about its effects on Irish society and where it was taking the country morally. As a result, none of these groups appears to have allowed the DMP returns for the years after 1915 to revise their opinions, even though the number of arrests for soliciting continued to fall.

  The main reason for the declining rate of prostitution in the city was increased prosperity, including the flow of separation allowances into the tenements and the growth of gainful employment for women in munitions, clothing and other war-related industries. This meant that far fewer engaged in more desperate ways of earning a living. Ironically, as the war progressed the concerns and fears of many nationalists would crystallise instead around the issue of separation women.20

  ‘From 1914 a new figure to the Irish scene became an odious symbol of British rule in Ireland, and a symbol that overtook the prostitute in the public understanding of immorality.’ This is how Maria Luddy characterises the way that separation women were regarded during the war years, and after.21 No figures exist for the number of women receiving allowances as dependants of men serving in the British forces, but it must have been significant.

  Separation women formed the second-largest group in the corporation’s survey of the north inner-city tenements, after labourers, when classified by source of income. There were 3,476 heads of households who were labourers and 1,705 who were separation women. Coincidentally, the range of incomes was almost identical, with labourers earning between 7s and 60s a week and separation women between 6s and 60s. The returns do not provide details of the spread of incomes, but for labourers the great majority are likely to have been earning under 30s a week; and, unlike separation women, the amount a labourer earned bore no relation to the number of mouths he had to feed.

  Most craft workers and even shopkeepers in the north city earned no more than 40s or 50s a week, so that resentment against separation women is easy to understand as regards comparative deprivation, especially given the widespread perception that much of the money the women received was spent on drink rather than on children.22 This view crossed the political spectrum, and the decision by the British government in 1916 to extend the payment of separation allowances to unmarried mothers outraged Irish public opinion. The military authorities were accused of promoting ‘illegitimacy’ and immorality; but the city’s councillors were relieved all the same that these women and their children were not thrown on the mercy of the workhouse system and the charity of the ratepayer.

  The DMP reports during the war years do lend support to the popular nationalist perception of these women. Indeed the figures suggest that there was some truth, in Dublin at least, in the old maxim that when it came to drink ‘the women were worse than the men.’

  Table 18

  Drunk and disorderly offences, 1911–19

  Even before the war a significant proportion of those arrested for drunkenness were women, and in 1912 they actually outnumbered male offenders for being drunk and disorderly. Arrests generally for this offence fell during the war years, but the proportion of women arrested rose, so that in 1918 and 1919 there were almost three times more female offenders than male offenders. The general falling off in arrests for both sexes after 1915 can be put down to declining consumption because of the increasing price of drink, shortage of supply, especially where spirits were concerned, reduced specific gravity levels, and the restrictive licensing laws. All of this was in tune with the thinking of David Lloyd George, who famously denounced the ‘drink traffic’ as ‘a greater danger even than Germany.’23 But perhaps some credit for increased sobriety can also be given to the pioneering work of the NSPCC and other voluntary bodies.

  Separation women were not, of course, the only ones in the city with high incomes. These included dealers and, in the latter stages of the war, munitions workers. Many of these women would have frequented pubs just as much as prostitutes—or men, for that matter—because, as the woman vigilante referred to above recognised, Dublin tenement life was so appalling.

  Ultimately the behaviour of some separation women towards rebel prisoners would seal their fate in the popular collective national memory. The recollections of the prisoners are almost unanimous in condemning what Dr Brighid Lyons Thornton referred to as ‘savage women’ from whom they had to be protected by their guards. What many prisoners probably did not know, and popular Dublin opinion quickly forgot, was that the rising coincided with the anniversary of the attack on Saint-Julien, where the ‘Old Contemptibles’ element of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, including many working-class reservists, suffered such heavy losses. At least some of the women who abused the rebels would have been mothers, widows, wives, daughters or sisters of the dead and wounded.

  People took what they wanted from the drama played out on the city’s streets during and after the rising. For increasing numbers of Dubliners, drunken separation women—like the slums, the raging inflation, food and fuel shortages, lewd music-hall shows, censorship and military repression—were a manifestation of the blight that Britain’s imperial war machine had visited on the city. Conversely, they believed that Irish freedom would banish immorality along with its most visible and potent source, the British army.

  The most extreme expression of this view came from the Irish Society for the Combating of the Spread of Venereal Disease, an ad hoc body in which Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan members were particularly active. They seemed to develop a particular obsession with the threat that syphilis posed to young children. Maud Gonne MacBride, widow of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride, told one meeting that the village of Artane was ‘crowded with war babies and some of them were suffering from syphilis.’ But, as Ann Matthews poi
nts out, the general effect of their campaign was to push ‘unmarried mothers and their children beyond the margins of social respectability’ rather than to generate informed debate.24

  In reality, of course, the problems of poverty, prostitution and sexually transmitted disease could not be banished by the demonising of separation women, the British army or Dublin Castle. If Kathleen Lynn and Richard Hayes were correct in demanding that the military authorities take responsibility for treating the fifteen thousand Irish soldiers they estimated would have contracted syphilis before returning home, they were also wishfully misdiagnosing the bigger problem. As events proved, the blight of sexually transmitted disease could not be laid solely at the door of the British army. However, this does not mean that their efforts were wasted. The concerns raised by Dr Lynn in particular helped mobilise other feminists, political activists and champions of public health reform to support the establishment of St Ultan’s Hospital in Charlemont Street in early 1919. However, to gather public support its aims had to be broadened beyond that of eradicating the threat posed by syphilis to young mothers and their babies.25

  Meanwhile the corporation moved to tackle the threat from STDs to adults by using recently activated Local Government Board legislation. In June 1918 a two-ward unit was set up in Dr Steevens’ Hospital to supplement existing facilities at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital and the Westmorland Lock Hospital in Townsend Street (an old facility for treating prostitutes and their children). It was proposed by P. T. Daly, chairman of the Public Health Committee, who had been so exercised by scenes on the North Wall in 1915 and had even advocated vigilantism. The unit opened in January 1919 and in its first three months recorded 452 male attendances and 59 female attendances; by the first quarter of 1920 the figures were 2,298 and 529, respectively, a fivefold increase in male attendances and a tenfold increase in female attendances. The number of cases increased after the establishment of the Irish Free State: there were 10,624 attendances at Dr Steevens’ Hospital in 1921/2, and the figure rose to 19,531 by 1924/5, when the British army could no longer be blamed for the problem.