Haunted by a troubled soul

When we moved into a railway cottage in Inchicore, built before the middle of the 19th century, little did we know that a previous occupant, one Alexander Morrow, had taken his own life in one of the rooms, writes PAUL CULLEN

EVERY HOUSE has its secret, and ours was to be found in The Irish Timesof February 16th, 1897.

A short article on page 3 told how Alexander Morrow, a clerk at the Inchicore Railway Works, was found dead in bed in the house we now live in. Morrow was a lodger, and the discovery was made by the occupier, William Lyons.

It seems the poor man came home on Saturday between 11pm and midnight, and was not in the habit of going out on Sundays. When he failed to appear that evening, his landlord became alarmed and entered the room.

“He then found Mr Morrow in bed with his throat cut,” the report continued. “Life was extinct. A razor was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.” The writer noted that the dead man had been suffering from a “bronchial affection” and that he was “of a melancholy disposition” but otherwise could offer no explanation for what had occurred.

I came across the clipping one evening last year when, bored with watching The Late Late Show,I took instead to browsing through the newspaper archive, which had recently gone online. My trawl threw up much that was informative or entertaining, but the brief account of Alexander Morrow's fate stayed in the mind. On a cold, bleak winter's night, I fell to thinking: what had driven him to take his own life? In which of our few rooms had the deed taken place? Did I now feel differently about the place I've called my home for the past 12 years?

After all, we first came to this end of Dublin 8 for the good vibes we sensed about the house and the area. At the very end of the 20th century we moved into a railway cottage in Inchicore, built in the first half of the 19th century – a terraced house exuding character and warmth.

Our new home wasn’t shy about its age: the floorboards creaked, the fanlight was cracked, intricate mosses grew in the blackstone walls at the back and the bootscraper was worn down.

High walls, put up in Victorian times, surround the estate, which sits aloof from the madding city buzz beyond. Our road doesn’t appear on GPS maps, and when first-time visitors find their way to our door, they invariably comment that “it’s like the country”. Which it is.

People like to think their character seeps into the places they live in, like the Third Policeman and his bicycle. We decorate, renovate and refurbish in a bid to stamp our personality on the bricks and mortar that surround us. We draw on the bare walls before putting up the wallpaper, or stick newspapers under the carpets, all the time hoping that our houses will become time capsules for future generations.

The previous owner, Ber Burns, painted a message to herself on the kitchen wall, which continued to speak to us for many years. “A clean house is a wasted life,” it said in gaily stencilled letters, though it was only when the children arrived that we learned to wallow in this advice. She handpainted the stars that still adorn the ceiling of the box bedroom, where they have twinkled at night for each of our three daughters in their first years of life.

I like to think that the laughter of dinner parties and small children seeps into the fabric of the house, where it will be stored up for the future, just as the sun’s heat radiates from the walls at the end of a hot summer’s day. Yet houses, like trees, outlive us, and by a long shot. Trying to stamp our character on a building seems like an exercise in futility when our lives are so short and our contributions so limited. It’s more likely that houses influence us than the other way round.

But if that is the case, what was I now to make of this bad karma in the story of our house? I resolved to find out more about the history of the house – to set the record straight, as it were. It was built in the 1840s, but it wasn’t until CIÉ sold the railway cottages to their occupants in the 1970s that they gained their first owner-occupiers. Thom’s Directory tells me that Mrs Kelly, later listed as Bridget Kelly, lived here from 1936 at the latest until the 1980s, when the house was sold to a private buyer for the first time.

The Irish Timesarchives chart some of the main events to affect the estate over the years, in particular the decline of the railways. At one time, older neighbours tell me, CIÉ wanted to raze all the houses, while in the 1980s it planned to sell the works to a German company.

Thankfully all its plans came to very little, and the area remained preserved in aspic for decades.

Not for much longer, though. The city, only three kilometres away, now surrounds the area, and high-rise buildings are marching up from Heuston. Irish Rail wants to tunnel under the estate for an underground Dart, and if the promised station materialises, development will inevitably follow.

The archives threw up little about Alexander Morrow. The newspaper article said he had only one known relative, a brother whose whereabouts was unknown, and his name failed to turn up in other records.

William Lyons, however, features in a number of historical records. Like everyone who lived in the estate at the end of the 19th century, he was employed in the railway works. The Great Southern and Western Railway controlled many aspects of people’s lives in this area: the houses they rented; the Model School down the road they attended; and the refectories, church and cricket pitches, all laid on in the best paternalistic Victorian manner. Houses of varying size were allocated according to seniority, from the grand chief engineer’s house in the works down to the more modest cottages around the estate. The join between work and home was seamless – people fenced their gardens with railway sleepers and used cinders from the foundry as underfloor insulation.

Lyons worked as a moulder and foreman, and with his wife Mary Ann he had 10 children, of whom six were living at the time of the 1911 census. Three were still at home. I wonder how many were born in the house. Most likely all of them. Large families, of course, were nothing unusual. A recent contributor to a local website I run, inchicore.info, recalled growing up in a family of 17 in a three-bed house in the estate.

The census enumerators recorded a total of 156 people living on our road in 1911. I’d estimate this is about three times the present population. There were 126 Catholics, 22 members of the Church of Ireland – including William Lyons and his family – and eight Methodists. The names of some long-established railway families, such as Currivan, survive in the area to this day.

The death of Morrow doesn’t seem to have been the only tragedy to befall the house at this time. Church of Ireland records available online show William and Mary Ann Lyons had a son, Charles, in 1895, and a daughter, Emily, in 1900, yet both names are absent from the 1911 census and even the 1901 census. The death notices of The Irish Times record the death of another son, John, in 1908, at the age of 15.

My amateur efforts at genealogy didn’t manage to establish what happened to the Lyons family. Did they join the Protestant exodus from the newly independent Irish State in the 1920s, I wondered, or were they hit by the subsequent decline of the railways? Most journalism is a sprint, but historical research is a marathon event.

More time and expertise were called for, but one of its perils is serendipitous distraction. For now, Alexander Morrow and his troubled soul can rest easy, safe from these prying eyes.