Hacked Off – Frank McNally on the trail of Hackball, King of the Beggars

Thanks to several readers, I now know a lot more about “Haeball – King of the Beggars”, the 18th-century Dublin character mentioned here earlier in the week. The most important revelation is that he was better known as “Hackball”, although his real surname was Corrigan or Carrigan.

Being disabled, he was also famous for his mode of transport– a cart variously said to have been drawn by two dogs, or an ass, or sometimes by children. This and his aristocratic bearing – he was a bit of a philosopher who spoke good French – inspired the “King” part of his nickname and the satiric toasts often made in his honour. When his vehicle collided with a coal car on Ormond Quay in 1756, a Dublin newspaper reported that “his Lordship very narrowly escaped being killed”.

He seems to have been a popular figure among the general population, if not the city fathers. In 1774, an attempt to arrest “the noted beggar, commonly known as Hackball” was foiled by a “riotous mob”, after which officials offered five guineas to anyone who could successfully deliver him to the “House of Industry”.

Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s sketch we have already mentioned. But it may be also be Hackball who features in the foreground of another artwork, Joseph Tudor’s panorama of “Sackville Street and Gardiner’s Mall, Dublin” (circa 1750), in the National Gallery. In any case, his fame lingered long after he did.

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At a high-society fancy dress ball in Limerick in 1837, for example, he inspired the costume of the guests. Elsewhere, Daniel O'Connell was being dubbed "Hackball King of the Beggars" by opponents. Reinforced by his Catholic Rent (the penny a month levied from supporters), the characterisation stuck. A century later, "King of the Beggars" was the title of an O'Connell biography, by Seán Ó Faoláin.

Where the "Hackball" part of Corrigan/Carrigan's nickname came from is not clear. When I found it mentioned also in the writings of William Carleton (1794-1869), I hoped he might explain. Carleton, after all, gained dramatic insights into Dublin's mendicant community soon after his arrival in the city from Tyrone.

One day, when he could no longer pay for respectable accommodation, he was led – horrified – to a cellar off Bridgefoot Street, where he paid twopence for a bed among the local homeless. He later likened the scene to “Dante’s Inferno” and was especially appalled at the widespread evidence of disability fraud by street beggars which made the cellar look like a theatrical props department.

But the "Hackball" Carleton mentions was a horse, the one that pulled the cart carrying "Rose Moan the Midwife" in his story of that name. Although her address is fictionalised, the midwife's surname (and its many variants, which include Mone, Moen, and Mohan) places her – and the horse – in the borderlands of Carleton's native Clogher, the diocese, if not the village.

By coincidence, a more recent literary Hackball has similar origins, Patrick McCabe’s 1999 story collection, Mondo Desperado, wherein a “Phildy Hackball” is the supposed author.

All of which leads me to one of Ireland's more notorious placenames, also a Border phenomenon, Hackballscross, in Co Louth. Its origins too are mysterious, but according to Fr Michael Murtagh, an oracle on the area's history, it seems to descend from a man known as "Paddy Hackball", who had a pub there in the days of the United Irishmen. Only the name remains now. We don't know how Paddy acquired it either.

Carleton must have passed through or near the area when walking to Dublin in 1817. He stayed for a time with relations in nearby Killanny and saw the notorious aftermath of the Wildgoose Lodge massacre of the year before. Eighteen men, guilty and otherwise, had been hanged for the crime, and their bodies gibbeted for months in tar-filled sacks hung at strategic locations in a triangular area of north Louth where the authorities thought people needed scaring. One of the points in the triangle was Hackballscross, where the gibbets held men named Lennon, McElearney, and Floody.

Less grimly, being close to Inniskeen, this was also outer Patrick Kavanagh Country. The poet's favourite cycling routes included the "low road via Hackballscross or Annavacky", heading east, towards Slieve Gullion and Ravensdale, where he considered the views to rival anything in Wicklow.

Annaghvacky (as usually spelled) was also well known for having one of the outdoor "dancing decks" synonymous with Irish crossroads past. But the townland may have been an accidentally apt neighbour for Paddy Hackball, whoever he was. Derived from the Irish Aonach an Bhacaigh, its name is attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to a fair that was once held there at which only beggars turned up.