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The Gas Men of Maryborough

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THE GAS MEN OF MARYBOROUGH

John Dunne

 

On the evening of Thursday, January 21, 1858, the town of Maryborough (Portlaoise since 1920), was, for the very first time, lit by gas.  But why did this landmark event, this ‘brilliant spectacle’, [1] in the town’s history come as a surprise to the very Company set up to bring gas to the town? Let’s go back to when, so to speak, the first flame was lit…

The first piped-gas street lamps appeared in Dublin in 1825. Almost thirty years later, in November 1854, local solicitor Thomas Turpin, ‘who always takes the lead in any matter for the improvement of Maryborough’, [2] proposed the setting up of a joint stock company for the erection of a gasometer. The cost, including pipes throughout the town, would be £1,500, to be raised by shares of £10 each.  To demonstrate his confidence in the scheme, he immediately put his name down for forty shares. Thus was born the Maryborough Gas Company and, within a month, £1,000 worth of shares were taken.

Work on the gasometer was scheduled to begin in the spring, and Mr. Turpin was confident that the town would be lit by gas [3] for the winter of 1855. The winter of 1855 and 1856 came and went and the Gas Company was still debating the venture with the Town Commission. A plan to erect the gasometer near the railway station was objected to on the grounds that vapours would be offensive to passengers [4] and it wasn’t until April 1857 that the Commissioners finally agreed on a site (where the Macra na Feirme Hall stands today). Following the receipt of plans and specifications for the project, an advertisement was placed in the papers seeking tenders for the construction of the gasometer and all associated works.

And so, on Thursday, June 4, the foundation stone of the Maryborough Gasometer was laid by Mr. Turpin, assisted by Mr. Lalor and Mr. Daniel from Dublin,  engineer and contractor respectively. Under the foundation stone was laid a hermetically sealed bottle containing various coins and documents with details of those involved in the venture. A small piece of artillery was discharged; there was much cheering by the large attendance from the town and surrounding districts, and a ‘poetic tailor named Farrell photographed (sic) the proceedings in a song’. [5]

That evening, Mr. Daniel entertained more than thirty of the great and the good of Maryborough – all gentlemen, of course – at a sumptuous dinner in McEvoy’s Hotel. [6] ‘The cloth having been removed’, various speeches were made and glasses raised to, inter alia, the Royal Family, the Lord Lieutenant, and Mr. Turpin. The festivities, including prolonged cheers and songs by Mr. Lalor and Rev. A. McDonnell, continued until midnight.

Preparations for the opening of the gasworks didn’t always run so smoothly. Sales of the shares were sluggish [7] – so much so that Mr. Turpin, the Parish Priest Dr Taylor and others, had to go around the town asking people to buy them –  and it was also discovered that someone had thrown broken spoons into the pumps in an effort to disable them.

By mid-October, nearly all the main pipes had been laid in the town, but it seemed unlikely that ‘new light would be let into the ancient borough’ by the promised date of November 1. It was, in fact, almost another three months before the town witnessed the ‘brilliant spectacle’ mentioned in my opening paragraph. And that  spectacle should not have happened on that night at all:  the Company’s intention was that, in order to honour the marriage of the Princess Royal, [8]  the general lighting should not occur until Monday, January 25. But, four days early, some of the townspeople – including Patrick Quigley, the Town Commissioner who had provided the site for the gasometer – were ‘so enthusiastically in favour of gas that they took advantage of Mr. Turpin and his staff of directors , engineer and contractor and blazed away in a flood of light’. [9] I suppose that, nowadays, we’d call that a stroke.

At dusk on Monday, January 25, many of the commercial premises, private houses and principal streets were officially illuminated. Townspeople of all ages turned out to witness the new phenomenon, but plans by some traders to light up their buildings with political emblems had to be abandoned due to high winds. An exception was  the Main Street premises of Thomas Craven  –  Secretary of the Gas Company – which featured an illuminated crown and stars, and on which ‘the jealous winds had but partial influence.’ [10]

At seven o’clock that night, McEvoy’s Hotel was again the venue for a celebratory public banquet  (unfortunately served up in the Freeman’s Journal [11] as a ‘pubic dinner’)  which boasted ‘every variety of the season, a profusion of confectionary, a superfluity of choice wines’ and the usual array of toasts and speeches. The same paper noted that the occasion was ‘much enhanced by several songs sung in excellent style by members of the company.’

Over  the next year or so, Mr. Turpin reported that the directors were very satisfied with progress so far;  70 gaslights in the Asylum and 29 in the gaol;  the streets lit by 21 public lamps; and townspeople with meters installed in their homes (no number given) had ‘expressed themselves in very satisfactory terms as to the superiority of gas over candles or oil’. According to the contract with the Town Commission, public gaslights were lit at dusk, extinguished before 11 pm, and not lit at all during a full moon. [12]

A meeting was held in September 1859 to reach a final settlement with the contractor, Mr. Daniel. This was a  less than congenial affair. A dispute had arisen over his alleged unpunctuality, his failure to purchase shares he had applied for, and the rather more serious matter of 45,000 cubic feet of  gas leaking from the gasometer. The proceedings developed into a flurry of charge and counter-charge, only resolved when the contractor reluctantly accepted reduced payment for his work.

Throughout its existence, the Company had its fair share of ups and downs. The breaking of public lamps, for instance, was so widespread that a reward was offered for information. In March 1868, the Leinster Express published a letter from  an anonymous shareholder which, in no uncertain terms, accused  the Company of secrecy and being looked upon with mistrust.  But most serious were the frequently-strained relations between the Gas Company and the Town Commission. [13] As early as 1864,  it was reported [14] that ‘the directors of the Maryborough Gas Company are endeavouring to give the Town Commission every species of vicious opposition they could’. In 1870,  the Company had difficulty in obtaining payment from the Commission [15] and the latter  complained about the  irregular and inconvenient way in which the town lamps were lit.

Six years later, matters reached a head when the Chairman and others, incensed at the Company’s refusal to reply to their letters, proposed that if such ‘outrageous treatment’ were to continue, they would advocate that the town be lit by paraffin oil. Which, of course, never happened, but there was still dissatisfaction with the Company’s performance [16] and friction between it and the Town Commission continued on and off into the new century.

By 1903, the retort bench (the construction which housed the retorts) was completely worn out and had to be replaced, and local builder William Carroll [17] was given the contract to build a new engine house and repair other buildings damaged in a recent storm. In March 1914, the Gasworks manager wrote to the Town Clerk complaining that someone was pilfering money from the meter in the Town Hall: add to this, scarcity of coal, strikes [18] and increased expenses, and it seemed that the new century was bringing nothing but  new woes for the  Company.

In March, 1920, following some public complaints about the state of lighting in the town, a well-attended meeting – presided over by Mr. P. J Meehan [19]  – was held in the Town Hall to consider the feasibility of forming an Electric Light company. [20] This was surely a sign that the times were indeed changing; that the writing was beginning to appear on the wall for the Maryborough Gas Company. That writing soon loomed so large that, in May, the directors offered to sell its premises and plant for £2,841.00 to the new  Maryborough Cooperative Electric Lighting Society. The offer was considered unreasonable and refused.

In 1928 the recently-established Electricity Supply Board [21] started to ‘wire’ the town, and now there was no escaping the fact that the days of the Maryborough Gas Company were indeed numbered. One of the last shots fired in the saga  of discontent between it and the Town Commission was a disagreement in 1929 over who actually owned the now-redundant lamp standards. [22]  The Maryborough Gas Company went into voluntary liquidation that year, and the gasworks and auxiliary buildings were subsequently advertised for sale.

The buildings remained derelict until the 1950’s when the local branch of Macra na Feirme acquired the site for a new Hall. [23]  As contractor Jack Bloomfield worked on the new building, the local paper marvelled at how the gasworks had been ‘built like a fortress, how the chimney stack resembled the keep of a Norman castle’. [24]  It went on to remark that ‘many strange tanks and formations were found in the foundations’. I wonder if the workers ever came across a sealed bottle with its parchment bearing the date June 4, 1857 and the names of those long-forgotten gentlemen, the original Gas Men of Maryborough..?

 

NOTES

[1] Leinster Express. January 23, 1858.

[2] As described in the Leinster Express. December 2, 1854.

[3] The basic process for making gas from coal changed little over the lifetime of the Company. Coal was heated in a closed tube called a retort. The gas given off was then cooled in a condenser. Coal tar and other impurities were removed before the gas was stored in the gasometer and ultimately piped throughout the town. The coal tar, incidentally, was sold for a variety of industrial and medicinal uses (in particular, the treatment of psoriasis, eczema, and other skin disorders).

[4] Other sites considered were where the Memorial Park is on Millview today; near where Brown’s shop now stands on the Dublin Road; and the old tanyard  (the area behind the now-derelict  County Hotel). The tannery is marked on an 1839 map of the town.

[5 Leinster Express. June 6, 1857.

[6] Jeremiah Grant Bar & Eatery today

[7] At  one of the Company meetings, this exchange took place:

Mr. Quigley: Mr. Daniel, the Contractor said he would take some shares.

Mr. Turpin: That was before he got the contract…

Mr. Daniel, incidentally, was later responsible for the gasworks at Ballyfin House. The works, much admired by the Lord Lieutenant when he visited the house in  September 1858, manufactured gas from peat at one-third of the cost of coal.

[8] Queen Victoria’s daughter, also Victoria, married Prince Frederick of Prussia, later Frederick III, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia.

[9]  His shop displayed the Harp of Erin and the Star of Hope in ‘jets of tremulous light’.

[10] Leinster Express. January 30, 1858

[11] January 27, 1858. The reporter present on the night was the extravagantly-titled Mortimer de Montmorency.

[12] Years later (1902), there was a farcical misunderstanding between Company and Commission because their respective almanacs gave different dates for phases of the moon!

[13]  Despite the fact that so many gentlemen were members of both bodies.

[14] Leinster Express. July 9.

[15] The Company’s Collector was the aptly-named Mr. Badger

[16] So much so that, in December 1890, Horace Turpin (a shareholder and director and nephew of Thomas) wrote to the paper describing the town lighting as scandalous.

[17] William Carroll’s legacy to the town also included classrooms in the Christian Brothers school which were officially opened in  January 1907, and the rebuilding of Odlum’s Mill after the fire of 1909.

[18] In January 1919, for instance, the gasworks closed down after the workers struck for a reduction in working hours and what the Company described as an extravagant increase in wages and an insistence on other impossible conditions. The employees distributed a pamphlet throughout the town explaining their position: the inevitable compromise was reached and the works reopened after a fortnight.

[19] Member of Parliament (1913-1918), he became the first State Solicitor for Laois (1922) and County Registrar (1926).

[20] In September 1923, the Town Commission accepted a tender for thirty gaslights in the town but also, and significantly, a tender from Odlum’s Mill to supply electric light to eight lamps on the Ridge, Mill Lane and the Green Road. Odlum’s, like Aird’s Central Hotel on Main Street (the Town Hotel today) which had its own electricity from an oil-driven generator, was one of more than 150 separate ‘mini’ electricity systems in the country at the time. Some were run by local authorities, others by entrepreneurs like J.J. Aird and W.P. & R. Odlum.  The surplus electricity not used in their own premises was often sold to other businesses in the town.

The first electric light in Ireland was a lamp outside the offices of the Freeman’s Journal in Prince’s Street in Dublin in 1880. In 1891, Carlow became the first provincial town to adopt electricity.

[21] In 1929, the hydro-electric plant at Ardnacrusha was commissioned and the ESB  eventually bought out all the small companies throughout the country. Thus from the early 1930’s, electricity was available to anyone who wanted it in Portlaoise town.

[22] The Town Commission had received enquiries from people who wanted them for sheds.

[23] The Macra na Feirme Hall was officially opened on August 15, 1955.

[24] Leinster Express. August  6, 1955.

 

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