Luncheon was spread in his private chamber in the Four Courts, Dublin, for Judge Kenny, when, about 1.30 p.m., a tramp entered and lost no time in helping himself to his lordship’s meal.
The Judge’s attendant on entering found this audacious visitor in the act of pouring out a cup of tea for himself. The attendant promptly seized him, and brought him out into the passage adjoining the chamber, leaving the culprit there while he sought a policeman. On the attendant returning, reinforced by a constable, there was no one to arrest.
The intruder had vanished, nor could a vigorous search reveal his whereabouts or the way by which he entered or escaped.“
Coming as it did at a time of general media fascination with judges’ midday meals, the theft made the international media as far away as Portland, Oregon. English newspapers of the period regularly chronicled the preferred luncheons of the English bench, which varied from liver and bacon (Lord Eldon) to beefsteak and oysters with two bottles of port (Lord Stowell) to sweet-toothed Baron Pollock’s cup of hot chocolate and a biscuit.
In contrast, the only source of information about the contents of pre-1922 Irish judges’ repasts is a report in the Dublin Daily Express of 3 April 1907 that Lord Chief Justice O’Brien’s bag, when recovered after being lost on the way to the Dublin Assizes, contained a quarter of a chicken and two roast apples.
There was a lot of poverty in Dublin in 1912, and the thief may simply have been hungry. Hopefully Judge Kenny did not begrudge his stolen lunch!
“A remarkable defence was made in a case in which Mr Robert Cramsie, barrister-at-law, of Ballymoney, Co Antrim, was prosecuted before the local magistrates by the Irish Insurance Commissioners for failing to pay the contributions under the National Insurance Act in respect of three employees. The defence was that the latter were not servants, but guests living in his house.
Maria Crawford said that she had been kitchen-maid for four years, but was dismissed on July 1st by Mr Cramsie, who said she was no longer his servant and he was no longer her master. Since then she had been in the house as a friend, doing just whatever she pleased. Mr Cramsie now did the work in the house himself – such as lighting the fires.
Mary Quinn, who had been housekeeping twenty-nine years, but was dismissed in July, said she now just occupied her time ‘mooching about’ the house. Mr Cramsie answered the door and attended to the fires, and she had seen him carrying food to the kitchen.
John Crawford gave evidence of a similar character, and said he was happy now, because there was no one like Mr Cramsie.
By a majority the magistrates imposed a fine of 6d in each case.”
Mr Cramsie, a JP and a very active and popular member of the Ballymoney community, died in 1932. In his will he left, among many other bequests to charities, friends and acquaintances, an annuity of £200 and any furniture in her bedroom and the kitchen she desires to have to his ‘faithful housekeeper’ Mary Ann Quinn, £100 each to her brother, George Quinn, and her sisters, Eliza Quinn and Mrs Ellen Dempsey.
He also left an annuity of £26 to Esther Green, formerly in his service, an annuity of £13 to Mrs Connor in his service, £100 to any other person in his employ of six months’ service and £100 to the trustees of Cramsie Endowment for the Benefit of the Poor.
From the Belfast News-Letter, 21 January 1922, this account of an interview with Frances Kyle, Ireland’s (technically) first woman barrister, having been called a couple of minutes or so before her colleague Averil Deverell:
“‘How do you like the wig,’ I asked as the short winter afternoon closed in, and we rose to say ‘good-bye.’ ‘Oh, not at all,’ said Miss Kyle, ‘It is so hot and heavy, and both Miss Deverell and I fought against wearing it, and petitioned the Lord Chief Justice that it might be dispensed with in our case, but he was adamant and would not hear of such a thing.’ Each counsel has his (or her) wig made specially to order ‘and women require a larger size, not that our brains are larger, but our back hair needs more room than the closely-cropped male head.’”
The substitution of shingles and bobs for the early 20th century pompadour coiffure may have required some subsequent wig re-sizing!
The Bar of England and Wales imposed similar rules to Lord Chief Justice Moloney above, with the added requirements that the wig totally cover the hair, and that hem lengths be no shorter than the length of the gown. Widespread breaches by English female barristers led to a revised diktat being issued in that jurisdiction in 1967, permitting a rise in skirts to knee length but specifically prohibiting the wearing of go-go boots.
Were similar measures taken in Ireland? There is no newspaper record, but short skirts remained in vogue among Irish women generally until well into the 1970s. Perhaps one of that magnificent band of Irish female barristers who commenced practice then or earlier might be in a position to comment as to whether or not the same approach was adopted in this jurisdiction?
“Passengers on the RMS Scotia from Dun Laoghaire (Kingstown) to Holyhead on Tuesday night witnessed the rescue of an Irish solicitor, Mr O’Connor. It appears that somewhere about mid-channel he fell overboard. The ship was stopped and one of the lifeboats lowered, and after a time Mr O’Connor was got safely into the lifeboat. After the lifeboat was hoisted up the vessel proceeded on her way to Holyhead.
The Scotia was travelling about 23 knots at the time. The cry of the man was distinctly heard by the other passengers when he fell overboard. They expressed admiration of the smart manner in which the situation was handled by the captain and crew of the vessel.”
The decks of Dublin-Holyhead ferries were notoriously unsafe – one hopes that the development of the tort of negligence on foot of the House of Lords’ decision in Donoghue v Stevenson the previous May led to safety precautions being taken to prevent further accidents!
The year after Mr O’Connor’s narrow escape, an English solicitor, Mr Paterson of Portsmouth, was also rescued after falling overboard a steam launch plying between Portsea and Gosport. Both he and Mr O’Connor were luckier than WB Pice, rising London barrister of the Inner Temple, who drowned when he fell overboard from a P & O steamer between Gibraltar and Marseilles in 1906, or indeed Irish barrister JS Barrett, who disappeared from sight into the waters of the South Quebec Docks in 1873 while in the course of helping a lady passenger with her luggage.
Temples of Justice and rare beauty can be chilly places, particularly when the breeze blows cold along the Dublin quays. At one point there was even a suggestion that the dome above the Round Hall should be removed to decisively exclude the wind. Though this thankfully never came to pass, the somewhat rudimentary forms of heating adopted in substitute (such as the ‘hot water tin’ option proffered to the Dublin Jurors’ Association in response to their 1887 application for the heating of jury boxes) often proved less than satisfactory.
The Irish Independent of the first Valentine’s Day of the new century contained a stark and very unromantic account of a frigid February on the Bench:
“Mr Justice Boyd, sitting in the Bankruptcy Court yesterday, complained of an absence of a proper method of heating the court. He said that when sitting in the adjoining court recently, trying a case with a jury, the cold was so intense that he gave permission to wear their overcoats and hats. All the people in the court complained of the excessive cold. It was an intolerable state of things. Nothing was done by the authorities. The fireplaces and the chimneys were so constructed that all the heat went up the chimneys, apparently as if the object were to make the jackdaws comfortable. Something should be done to heat the court properly. One of the official assignees was absent that day from a cold he got sitting in the court.”
Reassurances from Mr Littledale BL, a member of the Library Committee, that the Bar was similarly unable to control its own heating apparatus, which heated everything other than the Law Library itself, may have provided some (cold) consolation. Sometimes, however, the cure is worse than the disease, with the Freeman’s Journal of 16 May 1907 reporting that the Master of the Rolls had to vacate to another court after his own had been heated up almost to the requirements of a Turkish bath.
Meanwhile, the East Wing remained so chilly as to necessitate a full upgrade of the Law Library heating system proudly installed only a decade previously. The Irish Times of 19 October 1909 contained a full account of the proposed changes:
“There has just been completed an entirely new system of heating and ventilation in the Library at the Four Courts, and hopes are entertained by the Library Committee and the Board of Works that the frequent complaints as to defective ventilation, and also as to heating, will now to at least a large extent be removed… The last system in operation, that of introducing currents of hot air, without adequate ventilation, was generally condemned. The new system is the plenum system of heating and ventilation where the fresh air is introduced from the roof of the building where a special chamber has been constructed for the purpose. Having been purified, the air current is next conveyed through a coil of steam tubes and heated. From the heating chamber, a large pipe leads, between the ceiling and the roof, along the whole length of the Library, with the hot air current being distributed throughout the room beneath by means of smaller pipes. The cold air, and also the foul air, is withdrawn from the building means of two powerful fans, which have been erected at the Chancery Street end of the room. The whole system is completely controlled by a number of ingeniously contrived regulators, which have been placed in a glass case in the public consulting room.”
If all else failed, of course, there was still the Library fire, described in glowing terms in ‘Fun in the Irish Law Courts’ (1920):
“I verily believe that there have been more good things said, more good stories told, round the Library fire in the Four Courts than on any other spot on the globe. Now it is a lively sword-play of wits, thrust and parry, the quick retorts new-minted in the brain of the speaker. Now it is an old story the better for its age, like a coloured meerschaum or a seasoned violin, or a bottle of mellow old wine, a story flavoured with the varied humor of a score of successful tellers.”
There may have been an element of nostalgia to the above account. According to the Freeman’s Journal of 10 October 1918,
“[a] meeting of the Benchers was held yesterday at the Four Courts to consider the lighting and the heating arrangements and the duration of the sittings of the various courts during the coming law term, in view of the campaign for coal conservation. It was decided that the courts would sit each day from 10.30 to 3 p.m., with a half-hour interval for luncheon, but that there would be no sittings on Saturdays.”
Did the Law Library fire continue burning outside these hours? We may never know.
What we do know – and what the anonymous writer of ‘Fun’ did not – is that the days of the legal world so lovingly recorded by him were numbered. Change was afoot; the Law Library’s plenum system of heating and ventilation was to become redundant.
