Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police MagistratePorter, Frank Thorpe
History
Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police Magistrate
Porter, Frank Thorpe
Crime -- Ireland; Criminals -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs; Porter, Frank Thorpe, 1801-1882
I have to notice an event which occurred in 1855, and was productive of
most salutary results, not merely to the suburb in which it was
effected, but to the entire city and county of Dublin; I mean the
abolition or suppression of Donnybrook Fair. This excellent proceeding
was effected at the instance and mainly by the exertions of Alderman
Joseph Boyce, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in the last-mentioned year.
It would be almost impossible to describe the scenes of drunkenness,
violence, gambling, and gross indecency that characterized an entire
week in the month of August, every year whilst "The Brook" afforded its
immoral attractions, causing our prisons to be immediately crowded with
loose, disorderly, or dishonest characters, so as to resemble hospitals
in a locality suddenly visited by an epidemic or contagious distemper. I
do not believe that, for many years previous to its suppression,
Donnybrook Fair was ever held without being the direct or indirect cause
of a life or lives being lost. It lasted for a week; and the greatest
intemperance and violence seemed to be specially displayed on the day
known as "the Walking Sunday." I visited the fair on several occasions
in my days of boyhood, and I can recollect some sad accidents in which
lives were lost or limbs fractured by vehicles having been driven
furiously by drunken "jarveys." I have seen the body of a female taken
out of a mill-race close to the fair green, into which she had fallen in
a state of intoxication. I witnessed a very furious encounter on the
bridge between coal-porters and some other class of combatants, in which
a man was thrown over the battlement and killed by the fall; but the
worst experience that I had of Donnybrook was in 1820, when an amiable
and most inoffensive young gentleman, named James Rogerson, was walking
beside me through the main street of the village, about eight o'clock in
the evening, and was struck in the head by a large stone thrown at
another person. He was felled by the blow, and was raised in a state of
insensibility. After he had revived a little, I took him in a covered
car to his father's residence in William Street, where he died in a few
days from the effects of the injury, and the perpetrator of the fatal
assault was never made amenable for the offence. From the time when I
attained the police magistracy in 1844 until 1855, I had to deal with an
ample share of the charges and summonses arising from the annual
nuisance of Donnybrook Fair; and I fully agreed with my colleagues in
considering such duties as "moral scavenging;" and just as pedestrians
might apologise for mud-covered feet or bespattered garments being
unavoidable in filthy thoroughfares, so the delinquencies arising from
the various evil excitements abundantly offered in the locality where
they occurred, were almost invariably imputed to the offender having
unfortunately gone to "The Brook." I must admit that in disposing of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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