to meet the particular military needs of the time.
At noon on Tuesday 16 May 1922, amid torrential rainfall, in a ceremony that would have been unthinkable to the camp’s resident in the first seventy years of its history, the Tricolour was raised over the Curragh, signalling the takeover by the Irish army from departing British troops. The ancient enemy had finally been defeated, and a new country was beginning to find its feet and meet the challenge of internal discord. It was a period in which the Curragh would play a vital role, as it has continued to do in different ways, helping to shape and preserve a healthy democracy as well as contributing significantly to the part that Ireland now plays on the world stage.
PART I
THE BRITISH
‘The Silent Sentry’, Curragh Camp, is a curious engravement left over from the British years, yet its location is unknown to many (courtesy of Oliver McCrossan).
CHAPTER 1
Construction and Consolidation of the Curragh Camp
Construction
In March 1854, Britain and France declared war on Russia in a bid to prevent the Russian state from expanding southwards and gaining control of the Black Sea. The Curragh Camp owes its existence to this outbreak of hostilities in the Crimea. In early 1855, General Sir John F. Burgoyne, Inspector General of Fortifications, issued instructions that a camp for 10,000 infantry be built on the Curragh of Kildare as a temporary emergency measure to enable a greater number of troops to be trained for action in the Crimea. The planning, layout and overseeing of construction were entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel H.W. Lugard, Royal Engineers. Making use of the elevated expanse running the two-mile length of Long Hill, the camp’s layout was to run east to west, fronting to the north. The south’s sunnier expanse was to be forfeited in favour of the vista to the north, the racecourse and the manoeuvre plain. The camp plans could only be realized, however, if Lugard could satisfy one of life’s essentials, a plentiful supply of water.
The Curragh Camp, looking west, circa turn of the twentieth century (courtesy of the National Library of Ireland).
The River Liffey, two miles distant, provided one possible solution. Plans to raise and filter water into a large reservoir above the height of the camp from which a flow could be run into thirteen 10,000-gallon tanks were considered. However, in the end, a deep shaft was sunk to a depth of fifty-four feet in a natural hollow in the northern vicinity of the proposed camp site by Messrs A. and G. Holme, and an inexhaustible supply was sourced from the Curragh aquifer below at a rate of about 200,000 gallons a day. With the supply of water assured, detailed planning could begin.
A precisely designed grid system was to dominate the overall layout of the camp, with a series of ten squares containing hutments for 1,000 men each in ten distinct barracks. Officers’ houses and offices were arranged according to precise measurements across the top of each barracks, with the rows of soldiers’ huts and buildings for storage across the bottom. All the buildings were to be made of American white fir timber for the sake of speed and cost, but this decision also reflected the fact that the camp was initially intended to be temporary.
Two contracting firms were engaged: Messrs Courtney and Stephens, Blackhall Place, Dublin, to build the huts for the non-commissioned officers and men, together with the stables, and Messrs A. and G. Holme, Liverpool, to build the officers’ quarters, messes and offices. A total of around 2,000 workers were employed by the two firms. Construction began on 18 March 1855. Broken into multiple teams, each team’s daily task was the construction of a single billet hut in which they would sleep that night. The following morning, military personnel, who had been accommodated in tents, would move into the hut, and so began construction on each new day. In this manner, accommodation for 5,000 troops was completed in four months, by 9 July 1855. The local economy benefited considerably from this brisk building schedule through the provision of goods and services in addition to the boost it received from local employment within the general labour force.
The Curragh Camp was to incorporate new features to improve the health and welfare of its occupants, prompted, no doubt, by public dissatisfaction at the time with the appalling conditions that soldiers were enduring in the Crimean War. For the first time, journalists on the ground were providing uncensored reports on these conditions. The best known of these journalists was Irishman William Howard Russell of The Times, who revealed that the hardships and suffering of the troops were due to a mixture of supply shortages, poor equipment, inadequate medical facilities and tactical folly. The impact of Russell’s reports was heightened by their immediacy, with telegraph being used to dramatically decrease reportage times. Much public criticism was quickly aroused, leading to demands for inquiries and official reports, the outcomes of which were beginning to come on stream as Lugard was in the process of laying out his camp. While remaining rudimentary, transitory and predominantly functional in nature, the camp’s design was, nonetheless, forward-looking and modern for its time. Provision was made for churches, both Catholic and Anglican, a school, post office and reading and recreation rooms, while the squares included married soldiers’ huts, washrooms, women’s privies and sanitation measures for toilets and drainage.
The Curragh Camp circa turn of the twentieth century (courtesy of the National Library of Ireland).
As knowledge and dissatisfaction about the distress of the soldiers in the Crimea grew, they also gave rise to the beginnings of the Nursing Corps, with ‘The Lady of the Lamp’, Florence Nightingale, and her nurses being allowed to render caring interventions at the front to sick and wounded soldiers. Illness and disease were killing more soldiers than the Russian Army, and many soldiers died of preventable infections to their wounds.
A little known fact is that there was a second group of nurses that was equally, if not more, effective – the fifteen members of the Irish Sisters of Mercy Order under the direction of Mother Mary Francis Bridgeman, Mother Superior of the Convent of Mercy, Kinsale, Co Cork. She and Florence Nightingale did not enjoy a good relationship, differing over issues of control and responsibility and approaches to nursing care and methodology. They agreed to work in separate locations, Florence Nightingale in Scutari, Mother Bridgeman in Koulali and later at Balaclava. There has been little awareness of their contribution until recently because of the unobtrusive manner and quiet zeal with which they went about their duties; they believed it unbecoming to circulate publicity about themselves. At the time they received no formal recognition for their participation, and upon return to Ireland they quickly re-engaged with the many demands made on them. Individual diaries have survived and their experiences have come to light. What set them apart from the beginning from Florence Nightingale was that the sisters considered it necessary to offer care not only to those suffering from battle wounds, but also those suffering from disease, diarrhoea and deadly fevers. Three quarters of those who perished died from illness, not injury. The sisters had a very definite, and different, view of what constituted nursing care, and it included ‘night duty’ or the ‘watching’ of patients overnight, administration of medicines, stimulants and food. This careful nursing also involved the cooking of ‘extras’ or special diets. Their approach was firmly rooted in their experience of disease gained during the cholera epidemic in Ireland in 1832 and of two decades of caring for the sick poor. Frostbite was another condition frequently encountered by the troops, and whenever cholera abated, typhus often took its place. Two nurses had to be sent home due to illness and two died from a malignant
