Category: The Four Courts Building

The interior of the Four Courts might not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking of a tourist destination, but once upon a time it was unmissable for sightseers visiting Dublin. J & W Gregory’s ‘Picture of Dublin’ (1816) describes the ‘new’ Courts of Justice as ‘one grand pile of excellent architecture’ and the Round Hall as ‘crowded with lawyers and loungers,’ not to mention pickpockets. It also includes an old map from 1610 showing the original layout of the old Inns of Court previously on the site.

Thomas Cromwell’s ‘Excursions through Ireland’ (1820) describes the interior of the Round Hall as ‘so extremely beautiful, that no verbal description can convey an adequate idea of it: ’tis simple! ’tis elegant! ’tis magnificent.’ We learn that the courts are separated from the Hall by curtains – no doors – and that the judges sit in a cove with sounding-boards over their heads. Cromwell also includes some gems of information about Irish barristers and how they were perceived abroad: more agreeable companions than their secluded English counterparts; greatly distinguished for their conviviality and social talents; possessed of much eloquence, though usually more witty than profound, and with a predilection for punning; irreproachable in moral character; fascinating in manner; amiable and exemplary in their conduct in private life, though inclined to be lighthearted even on the most solemn of occasions, which he attributes to the absence of the wig at county assizes.

Many of the images of the early Four Courts originate in old tourist guides. Wright’s ‘Historical Guide to the City of Dublin’ contains an engraving of a drawing by George Petrie showing goings-on around the Four Courts of the time. From it, we learn the history of the old Four Courts in Christchurch and also discover that the very first coffee-room in the new Courts was in the basement, along with numerous other apartments. Is this extensive subterranean layout – which presumably survived the destruction of 1922 – still accessible today?

Starrat’s ‘Visitor’s Guide to the Metropolis of Ireland’ (1830) contains some interesting information about the different courts. From it we learn about the Court of Chancery’s role in giving relief for and against infants and married women, the role of the Court of Common Pleas in civil cases between private individuals, and the role of the Court of Exchequer in recovering revenue and as a court of record, with additional equitable jurisdiction. We also find out that, prior to 1695, the Law Courts were ambulatory and held in Carlow and Drogheda as well as Dublin. Perhaps we need to rediscover the legal history of these two towns?

An updated ‘New Picture of Dublin’ by Philip Dixon Hardy (1831). Not much new information here, but a great illustration of the front of the Courts!

Another great illustration of the Four Courts from ‘Ireland Illustrated’ by Petrie, Bartlett and Wright (1831), which references the ‘beautifully finished quay walls, of chiseled granite’ outside the courts’. Included is the usual complaint that the building is situated too close to the river.

‘The Irish Tourist’s Illustrated Handbook‘ of 1852 references a recent falling off in business in the Round Hall, previously ‘a scene of wonderful bustle and excitement’. It suggests venturing into the ‘large and commodious’ courts in the hope of catching a glimpse of some of the great judges occupying ‘the always distinguished Irish bench.’

A fascinating nugget of information here in Heffernan’s ‘Handbook of Dublin‘ (1861), which describes a pedestal in the centre of the Round Hall on which stands ‘a colossal statue of truth holding a torch, through which, is conveyed a gas tube by which the hall is illuminated during the sittings in the winter evenings.’

The same statue is referenced again in Black’s ‘Picturesque Tourist of Ireland,’ 1877. You can view an image of it here. It seems to have been originally called ‘Themis’, then ‘Truth’. Originally described as pretty, it was subsequently felt to be too large, and removed to the park beside King’s Inns, where it acquired its third name of ‘Henrietta’. This almost certainly saved it from being destroyed in 1922. Sadly – and somewhat controversially – trifurcated by a film truck some years ago during the filming of ‘Jack the Ripper,’ it was last heard of wrapped up in the basement of King’s Inns – hopefully just a phase of restorative resting before a third act!

According to ‘What’s to be Seen in Dublin’ (1888), during term time the scene within the Hall is animated and striking: clients hunting for solicitors, solicitors hunting for clients, established barristers and those who hope to be so, and groups of all sorts talking on all manner of subjects, from the affairs of State to the state of the weather.

One of the most beautiful tourist guides to Dublin is Frances Gerard’s ‘Picturesque Dublin Old and New’ (1898), containing many illustrations by Rose Barton, including a depiction of Chancery Lane, near Christchurch, close to the area informally known as ‘Hell,’ where the Four Courts were located before they moved across the river. According to Barton, the two great possessions of Dublin are the Castle and the Four Courts, and whatever about the first-named, ‘the legal element dominates society in Dublin and is held in the highest respect,’ doing duty for the absentee nobility. She also discusses the vaults of St Michan’s.

Belying its name, the ‘Thorough Guide’ (1906) is fairly sparse on the Four Courts, although it does mention the 1887 fire in the Vice-Chancellor’s court.

It seems that by the early 20th century the Four Courts was losing its attraction as a tourist destination. Black’s 1912 ‘Guide to Dublin’ has the cheek to describe the Round Hall as inferior to its counterparts in City Hall and the National Museum. It also complains that the view of the Courts is spoiled by huge advertisements on the Ha’penny Bridge.

By now illustrations had been replaced by the camera and ‘A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Dublin’ (1919) contains a somewhat forbidding photograph of the Four Courts. In such a politically charged era it is unlikely that visits to the Courts would have been encouraged. Even barristers were occasionally removed by the Black and Tans.

This would be the last tourist guide to feature the original Four Courts. The Four Courts rebuilt after the destruction of 1922 would be a more workmanlike, less ornate place and – in a city which once again had its own parliament – no longer the centre of Dublin political and social life. In the absence – as yet – of time travel, old tourist guides fill an important gap in reconstructing the lost but enticing world of the Four Courts of the past!

The original Record Office designed for the Four Courts site by Thomas Cooley did not include a dome, but Cooley’s early death in 1784 coincided with an official decision to expand his design to include the Irish Four Courts, previously situate at Christchurch. His successor James Gandon achieved this by incorporating a central hall at the front of Cooley’s partly built pile, and crowning it with not one but two domes, one on top of the other, with a void between containing a large and brightly lit apartment.

The 1844 depiction above shows an interior dome with a rich spherical mosaic ceiling rising above the Round Hall. It had eight windows and a circular opening or ‘lantern’ into the void above, admitting an abundance of light. In the piers between the windows stood eight colossal allegorical statutes by the sculptor Edward Smyth, representing Authority, Punishment, Eloquence, Prudence, Liberty, Mercy, Wisdom and Justice, resting on pedestals or consoles. Above them ran a frieze incorporating medallions of eight great law-makers: Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, Confucius, Alfred, Manco-Capac and Ollamh Fodla.

Below the statues were bas-reliefs, also carved by Smyth, depicting William the Conqueror establishing the Courts of Justice, King John signing Magna Carta before the Barons, Henry II granting the first Charter of Dublin and James I abolishing the Brehon laws and publishing the Act of Oblivion.

Not everyone approved of the Four Courts dome. Many years after its completion, members of the Royal Institute of Architects were still describing it as a comical covering displaying obvious want of harmony with the vertical outlines of the lofty tambour on which it was placed, which goes to show it is impossible to please everybody.

Thackeray, on the other hand, liked the dome and his Irish Sketchbook of 1842 praised the ‘very brilliant and beautiful prospect’ at Carlisle (O’Connell Street) Bridge with it visible on the right and the Customs House dome (also by Gandon) on the left – a view sadly ended due to subsequent alterations to Carlisle Bridge, though the Freeman’s Journal did suggest that it never existed even prior to these alterations, and that Thackeray was making things up. Possibly he mixed up Carlisle with Essex Bridge downriver, from which it is indeed possible to see both buildings.

The substantial void between the two domes, originally intended for a law library, was found ill-calculated for such purpose and instead used for the storage of public records. It filled up very fast, to the extent that there were soon concerns that the weight of the records would cause the interior dome to collapse. The below image from an official report shows the organisation of the records in 1819, after a clear-out and tidy.

By 1851, however, this beautiful system had become disorganised, resulting in a newspaper campaign to gather together and rescue from destruction what the Freeman’s Journal described as the scattered records lying in confused heaps on the floor of the Dome. Some success appeared to have been achieved in 1854 when the Freeman joyfully reported that those most precious vouchers of Irish history trampled under foot on its floor were finally to be put in order; however there was a subsequent delay in moving the records due to a lack of competent supervision, and it was not until 1872 that the removal was officially complete. Even then, a pile of documents relating to the Court of Queen’s Bench which had fallen to a cavity between the void and the interior dome were inadvertently left behind, and only recovered some years later.

While generally neglected, dusty and filled with pigeons, the dome (or domes) received occasional attention over the years.  The exterior dome was illuminated in 1856 as part of the Peace Celebrations which took place to mark the end of the Crimean War. When, in 1861, the Four Courts served as a venue for the Social Science Congress (above – its one and only stint as a conference venue), the interior dome was removed from dust-laden obscurity by Mr Hamman, of Grafton Street, who oversaw its redecoration in neutral lavender with white and peach accents. There was a later redecoration in 1896, this time in tones of white and blue, with the classic figures and medallions in bas relief painted white on a blue background.

Possible collapse due to the weight of records stored in the void was not the only threat to the dome over the years. A storm of December 1822 caused the copper sheeting around the exterior dome to be raised and cut in may places by the wind.  In 1854 lightning and thunder flashed immediately above, causing dramatic scenes in the hall below unequalled since its invasion by a Smithfield bull twenty years previously.

But it was the 1922 Battle of Dublin, and the sledgehammer-insect determination by forces of the Provisional Government to use an eighteen-pounder to bring down a sniper firing from one of the windows in the void, that finally put paid to Gandon’s beautiful edifice – and most of Smyth’s plasterwork – leaving little more than the pillars and masonry of the dome surviving.

Although there were initial suggestions to demolish what was left of the Four Courts altogether – with one suggestion that it should be rebuilt as a concert hall for the Feis Ceoil, by July 1926 the exterior coppering of the new dome was complete, albeit to the sound of complaints that it was higher than its predecessor, and it was floodlit again in 1932 for the Eucharistic Congress.

Concerns about the safety of the replacement dome grew during the Second World War. In January 1941, not long after the Sandycove bombings of December 1940, a Board of Works electrician, Robert Norris, was tragically found hanging from its void. A subsequent inquest attributed his death to unsound mind caused by anxiety about future bombings. Although there were in fact subsequent bombings at North Strand, Dublin, in May of that year, both the city and the Four Courts Dome managed to survive the Emergency generally intact.

The dome was renovated again in 1970, almost half a century after its reconstruction, at a cost of several thousand pounds. Described as the most awkward job of its kind carried out in Dublin in recent years, the renovation led to a compensation claim by Dublin Corporation in respect of lead and copper allegedly removed by thieves who had climbed the dome while in the course of reconstruction. Later, in 1997, the dome was visited by other creatures of prey – a pair of peregrine falcons who used its high roof line as a hunting base.

Over the years the Four Courts dome has been compared to many things: a mosque in Baghdad (Irish Independent, May 1941), a golden rose in a great bronze cup (Sean O’Casey, ‘Pictures in the Hallway’), a ‘prostate bub’ (JP Donleavy, The Ginger Man), a ‘reverser whose fine clothes have been somewhat torn and muddled but who still keeps his fee‘, St Paul’s Cathedral, London (which also has a double-dome) and even the Pantheon at Rome (Pictorial Times, 25 November 1843). The second image in the above slideshow shows how it also served as a newspaper comparator to illustrate the height of waves at sea during a storm.

A less obvious but equally apt comparison was Trafalgar Square, due to the pigeons who moved into the interior dome after removal of the records, occasionally depositing their detritus on unlucky individuals in the hall below. An article from the Dublin Evening Telegraph, of 30 June 1922 describes the number of birds within the dome at this time as having been in the hundreds, and states that one of the great amusements of Dublin in the 1880s was for immediate residents with sporting proclivities to shoot pigeons in the Four Courts after hours.

Queen Victoria’s statue sat on Leinster Lawn for a while, but might have ended up on the Four Courts too, if an 1897 suggestion of the Dublin Daily Express that readers contribute 2s 6d towards the erection of a statute in her honour on its very top had been followed. I am sure that, if so installed, she would not have been in the least amused by the events of 1922, but perhaps her presence on the top of the dome might have made the forces of the Provisional Government a little more careful about how indiscriminately they directed their fire.

It may be too late to restore Edward Smyth’s beautiful sculptures and bas-reliefs, of which only limited secondary evidence survive, but what is the current status of the void between the domes? It will be interesting to see what, if anything is done with it in the future.

The dome(s), currently under renovation yet again, will, no doubt, have many more stories to tell!

From the Dublin Evening Telegraph, 7 April 1921:

“Today in the Northern Police Court, before Mr Lupton KC, Mr John Barror, Coffee Room Bar, Four Courts, was summoned, at the suit of Mr Tannam, Inspector of Food, for having, on the 15^th February last, sold him four glasses of whiskey adulterated by the addition of 4 percent of water.

Mr W J Sheridan, solicitor, for defendant, said he admitted the fact.  His client was totally unable to account for it.  He got his whisky from Jameson’s.  Of course, he did not in any way blame Jameson’s, but he merely mentioned the fact to show Mr Barror’s bona fides.  He had been a long time in business without a complaint, and he, Mr Sheridan, thought that in these circumstances a caution would meet the case, the amount of adulteration being small.

Mr Burke (Assistant Law Agent) said whiskey was a very expensive article at present. 

The Magistrate said he made a rule in each case to impose a minimum fine of £5, unless there was very good reason.  Recently he had visited the Sheriff’s courts at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and found that in one case, where a defendant said he had been 30 years in business without a conviction, yet was fined £20.  In this case he would fine the defendant £5.”

The Four Courts Hotel on Inns Quay also purchased its whiskey from Jamesons, or so Mr Lupton was told by its managing director Mr H G Kilby in an earlier adulteration prosecution reported in the Irish Independent of 19 December 1918.  In that case it was suggested that a cask of the offending whiskey might have been left in a corridor in transit from cellar to bar, giving unscrupulous servants the opportunity to abstract and replace with water.  Mr Lupton imposed a fine of £7.

Mr Barror, who also held the position of caterer to the RDS, Ballsbridge, had, with the approval of the Benchers, obtained a transfer of the coffee-room licence from a Mr Murphy in April 1900. His premises in the then Solicitors’ Building (now the Law Library) were comprehensively destroyed in the Four Courts bombardment of 1922.  A subsequent compensation claim for destruction of stock, silver plate and equipment was heard before the Recorder of the City of Dublin at Green Street Courthouse on the 22^nd May 1922. Sums claimed included £108 for an old George snuff box of 1700, £76 for an early Victorian silver sugar bowl and cream jug and £100 for an old Irish silver kettle.  The total amount claimed was £8,971. An unsympathetic Recorder awarded £5,950.

Mr Barror features again in the newspapers in 1923, when he sued the management of the Mater Carnival held in the grounds of the RDS for £549 in loss and damage to cutlery. His catering business was a family one – his daughter Mary Barror also put in a claim for loss of personal items in 1922, and the family may also have run Barror’s Restaurant in Henry Street. He lived at Park Avenue, Sandymount, Dublin 4 and had a son who fought in Gallipoli. In addition to his professed hobby of collecting antique silver, he may also have been involved in the yachting world.

Mr Barror’s 1921 conviction for selling adulterated spirits puts a new complexion on a minor feature of the rebel occupation of the Four Courts in 1916. As previously noted, his coffee room remained entirely untouched by the rebels. Was this because, even before the prosecution above, there were whispers that, while the silver was good, the alcohol in its drinks cabinet was far from being as proof as it ought to be? 😉

Image credit

From the Irish Times, 17 January 1860:

“COURT OF COMMON PLEAS – YESTERDAY – THE HOT WATER PIPES

Previous to the commencement of the business of the court, Mr Serjeant Fitzgibbon complained of the constant steam that was coming up from the pipes underneath the table close to which the gentlemen of the inner bar were obliged to stand. He declared it was equal to a warm bath, and was likely to be attended with the worst consequences to Queen’s Counsel, who sometimes had to remain under the influence of the steam for hours. He asked… Chief Justice [Monahan] if he were a member of the building committee of the benchers, and, if so, to represent the matter to them, in the hope of having the nuisance abated.

The Chief Justice quite agreed with Mr Serjeant Fitzgibbon, and said he would represent the matter to the Board of Works. Mr Serjeant Fitzgibbon said that Gandon, the architect of the building, had designed fireplaces for the sides and corners of the building, which was the only proper means of heating the court.

Judge Ball said he hoped that improvement would be carried out such that his corner, which was exceedingly cold, would be taken into consideration. (Laughter)

The Chief Justice said that if Mr Serjeant Fitzgibbon sent in any suggestions on the subject they should be attended to.”

Steam heating was very popular in the mid-19th century but, as the above account shows, it had its drawbacks! Thankfully, the only steam which now rises from the bench reserved for Senior Counsel in the former Court of Common Pleas (now Court 2), is due to injured feelings in the cut and thrust of litigation.

Judge Ball (appointed in the 1830s) must have been sitting in that cold corner for quite a while. He doesn’t seem to have lost his sense of humour. Let’s hope he got to enjoy at least a couple of years of workplace warmth before his death in 1865!

Image Credit: (top and bottom left) (bottom right)