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
In about ten years after the affair at the theatre, the house of Sir
Abraham Bradley King in Dame Street was consumed by fire. The
conflagration commenced in the lower part of the premises, in which
there was a great quantity of stationery. The first and second floors
were almost immediately in flames. The catastrophe occurred on a Sunday
morning. No fire brigade was then organized, no fire escapes had been
provided. A man was in the top front room, and he had no access to the
roof. A fearful death appeared to be his inevitable fate, when another
man emerged from the roof of a neighbouring house, carrying a rope of
six or seven yards in length, at one end of which he had formed a
running noose. He stood on the narrow parapet over the window, and let
down the looped end to the poor fellow, whose only chance of escape
depended on the sheer strength and steadiness of an individual. The
rope was fastened round the waist of him whom the flames were fast
approaching, and he was carried along by the intrepid fellow whose
courage and humanity excited him to risk his own life to avert
destruction from another, until the window of the adjoining house was
reached, and the rescue was completed. This heroic act was accomplished
by Henry Hanbidge.
I had been ten or twelve years in office as a police magistrate, when I
was applied to by a poor old fellow who was suffering acutely and
completely debilitated by rheumatism, to sign a recommendation for his
admission to Simpson's Hospital. The applicant was Henry Hanbidge. I
most readily complied with his request, and told him that I would insert
a few observations on his noble achievement at the fire in Dame Street.
He expressed the deepest gratitude for my disposition to serve him. When
I was giving him the document, I said, "Now, Hanbidge, might I ask you
who threw the bottle?" He replied, "I did, your worship." I asked him
"from what part of the house was it thrown?" "From the upper gallery,
your worship. A friend and I had emptied the bottle, and I ran my stick
into the neck, and shot it straight to the curtain off the stick." My
predecessors had not thought of such a mode of projection.
EXCISE AND CUSTOMS CASES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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