Exploding Hogsheads And The Flaming Pig
Patrick Ryan looks at the story of how the squeals of a sow and cartloads of poo saved Dublin.
This month marks the 150 anniversary of a catastrophic blaze in the Liberties which, but for the bravery and ingenuity of Dublin’s first Fire Chief, and his men – not to mention a steaming pile of excrement – the heart of the city would well have been destroyed.
Dublin 8 has enjoyed a long connection to alcohol production, and in Victorian times several distilleries, and bonded warehouses holding the valuable product, operated in this part of our capital, a tradition reborn in recent generations as the Liberties once more is home to world class whiskey manufacturing from companies including Roe and Co, Pearse Lyons and Teelings.
To this day nobody knows exactly what set off the chain of events leading to the Great Whiskey Fire on the evening of June 18, 1875. At a time when most men smoked, and oil lamps were a common source of light a single carelessly discarded match could have been responsible but what is on record is that sometime between 4.35 pm and about 8 pm a blaze broke out in either Reid’s malt house or Malone’s bonded storehouse at the corner of Ardee Street, which contained 5,000 hogsheads (just under 1.2 million litres) of whiskey, the perfect fuel to feed hungry flames. It came at a huge cost in financial, and human terms.
“The former had above £2,000 of malt in it, and the latter, which immediately adjoins it, had 5,000 barrels of whiskey, worth £54,000,” the Illustrated London News later reported. For context that is the equivalent to about £6.6m (€7.75m today), and within an hour of the alarm bells ringing barrels started to explode under intense heat. Blue flames arched skyward, the liquid fire gushing out the doors and windows of the warehouses, forming a lava-like stream which ran down Cork Street, Ardee Street, Chamber Street, and onto Mill Street. Changes in the 1823 Licensing Act meant that distillers were only liable for tax on their whiskey when it was available for sale, rather than when barrelled, meaning businessmen like Lawrence Malone could make vast fortunes storing the product in huge warehouses, with few safety proceedures in place.
By 10 pm the torrent was a quarter of a mile long, two feet wide, and six inches thick, destroying a row of houses and a pub, as livestock fled in terror, the squeals of pigs, commonly kept in cities in that era, adding to the shouts, screams, and noise from explosions as thick smoke filled the air. The hullabaloo prompted some of the city’s more dedicated alcoholics to run towards the blaze, foolishly using everything from caps to porridge bowls – and even old boots, as the Illustrated London News reported, caricaturing the men in stereotypical stage-Irish terms – to scoop up and quaff the deadly, contaminated booze while others rolled away casks which had not caught fire. The international press, in Dublin to cover a shooting match, picked up on this angle and the story made its way around the world.
In all over 60 of the containers which had survived were unaccounted for.
“Three kegs were wheeled into the Coombe, and the result was that six persons were apprehended in a monstrous condition of intoxication, and numerous more were transported to hospital,” the Irish Times reported three days later.
Official figures suggest up to two dozen people suffered from alcohol poisoning, 13 of whom died, though incredibly the actual fire claimed no human lives. Several animals perished however, including according to the Irish Times report an unfortunate dog which after drinking the concentrated spirits started foaming from the mouth, ran into the house of one William Eyre, and leaped to it’s death from an upstairs window. In 2014 a new Irish whiskey, Flaming Pig was launched, commemorating (according to the publicity blurb) the squeals of the porker which escaped death and first alerted Dublin to the fire.
Within a quarter of an hour of this alarm being raised hundreds of police officers and 200 soldiers joined firefighters tackling the blaze and evacuating locals, under the command of Captain James Robert Ingram, head of the Dublin Fire Brigade, a local man and Freemason. Ingram had gained much experience in tackling such emergencies during his years serving New York, before returning home to head the Dublin Fire Department, as it was initially called, following the formal adoption of the Dublin Fire Brigade Act at the corporation meeting of June 27, 1862 prompted by a series of high profile blazes which destroyed properties at some of the city’s most exclusive addresses.
Initially the spirited efforts of the captain and his men stem the stream of whiskey proved futile. Dousing it with water would send the alcohol floating to the top, and the flaming torrent flowed under doors, and fences, making it almost impossible to extinguish. Ingram ordered the firefighters to lay down mounds of sand and gravel, but when that proved unsuccessful the Dubliner, known for his out-of-the-box thinking and calm demeanour amid excitement turned to excrement.
In 1875 horses were the main means of transporting goods and people around the capital and their dung was regularly swept up and stored at various points in the city. Ingram ordered it be collected, and mixed with ash and animal waste from the nearby tanneries, before being spread on the streets where the nasty mixture quickly hardened and proved a lifesaver, eventually stopping the flow. The Liberties was saved, though at a huge cost to local businesses and residents.
Ingram’s men had the unpleasant task of trying to prevent desperate locals from reentering their wrecked tenements to seek shelter.
“The destruction of these wretched houses is, to a great extent, a blessing, as all those destroyed, with one or two exceptions, were the haunts of epidemic disease, and furnished annually large supplies of patients to the Cork Street Fever Hospital,” the British Medical Journal declared in their July 3rd edition a fortnight later in a report which was also highly critical of the lack of safety proceedures and the practice of storing such a flamable product in poor areas.
“The scene on the morning after the fire, exhibited by the ruins, with their late occupants seeking for some remains of their lost property; the powerful odour of the spirit as it streamed from the ruins and lay in pools the streets; tottering walls, scattered bricks, broken-up sewers, and raving drunkards, mixed up with famine, policemen, hogsheads of whiskey, crying women and frightened children, baffle all description.”
The bravery and ingenuity of the captain and his team won widespread praise, proving yet another wake-up call for a complacent city which was still relying on an underfunded service and private firefighters in times of crisis.
It wasn’t as if this was a new phenomenon. The capital’s organised emergency response dated back to 1711 when Dublin Corporation purchased two fire engines from the city’s water engineer John Oates and paid him £6 to maintain a service but a century-and-a-half on this was still a piecemeal, ad hoc effort. Local parishes’ volunteers manned their own tenders and Dublin Metropolitan Police provided an efficient, if limited response in the city centre from the Kevin Street DMP HQ using equipment again funded by the ratepayers.
Our first “fire station” was in the Liberties, at Whitehorse Yard, off Winetavern Street near Christchurch Cathedral which from 1854 housed an engine supplied by J & R Mallet of Ryder’s Row, overseen by a Corporation Waterworks Inspector.
Before 1862 insurance brigades would respond to outbreaks on subscribers’ buildings showing their company’s plaques, known as “Fire Marks”, but not everyone could afford these premiums and it wasn’t unusual to see rival units stand by as buildings burned until fees were agreed between the parties, but Ingram’s appointment resulted in a more organized and professional approach.
Selection and training for his team, rising to about 40 men by the 1870s, was based on navy standards, stressing the ability to handle pumps (long used to clear water from ships’ holds), climb, and tie various knots in ropes, while the naval “watch” system was also adopted, which survives to this day.
By then the city began to rely less-and-less on private firefighting services, and advancements in technology and rigorous training helped to improve response times and efficiency, while expanding to other areas. In 1898 the Dublin Fire Brigade Ambulance Service was formed, responding to 537 calls in its first year; by the 2020’s their successors were answering over 100,000 calls per annum.
What was the fate the heroic Captain Ingram, the man whose vision and bold action saved countless Dubliners from a horrific death? The esteem in which he was held can be seen in the fact that two years after the Liberties’ Great Whiskey Fire he was selected to officially greet Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil on the monarch’s visit to City Hall, but within five years Ingram contracted TB, somewhat of an occupational hazard for anyone working in tenements, as historian Donal Fallon notes in a recent review of the events of June, 1875 for the Irish Independent. “Consumption”, as the highly contagious disease was called could be passed on by coughing, or even through drinking infected milk before pasteurisation became the norm, and carried a huge social stigma as it was rife in poor districts, accounting for almost one in every eight deaths in Dublin, killing 10,000 people a year. There was no known cure.
Predictably James Robert Ingram died in May 1882 at the age of just 52.
“Buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Jerome, no plaque honours his heroism on the streets of the Liberties. It’s surely time to amend that,” laments Fallon.
We agree wholeheartedly, and we’d go one step further. Dublin 8 has Ingram Road, in the Tenters close to Donore Avenue, but this is named after poet Sir John Kells Ingram so perhaps it’s time for an Ingram Place to commemorate a man without whose bravery, and ingenuity the Dublin 8 we know and love today might not have come into existence.
It’s the least we can do for a long-forgotten hero.
