The night of the big wind

The night of the big wind

6 Jan 1967

By MALACHY HYNES

It began at about 10p.m. on this day 128 years ago. A gale swept the country leaving death and destruction in its wake and registering the date of January 6, 1839, in the memory and folklore of the country as “The Night of the Big Wind.” Raging over the land, the gale toppled houses, ripped the roofs off barns and churches alike and caused fires, floods, shipwrecks, death and injury. No part of the country escaped the force of the wind as slates flew, buildings collapsed and fires were fanned to fury.

Premonition of doom gripped many of those who still could think, reeling though their senses were with, the terror of title berserk elements, their forebodings of a supernatural visitation being heightened by the ghastly gleams of the Aurora Boreals’s uncanny hues, which now and then were seen between rifts of crazily-flying clouds reddened by the lurid glare of all the country-wide conflagrations below. Even hardened reporters were _unmanned by what they witnessed on that “Night of the Big Wind,” as history has since named the onset of that storm, and so it was not until days later that their papers dazedly started to sift-out of the ruins and the ashes bits and pieces of their localities’ tragedies, and, too, the sublime heroism and humanitarianism these evoked.

On the following Tuesday the Freeman’s Journal reported:

“At an early hour on Sunday evening the wind freshened and by 10.30 p.m. it raged a furious gale, intensifying until after midnight it blew a most fearful and destructive tempest. Not a soul dare venture into the streets: the lamps were without almost any exception extinguished: and amidst the roaring of the hurricane, which threatened to sweep every obstacle before it from the surface of the earth, the pealing of the fire-bells, the sound of falling chimneys and windows breaking and slates and tiles flying through the streets were fearfully audible; and sometimes the still more dreadful shrieks of the alarmed inmates of tottering houses reached the ear, while the rocking walls and falling roofs threatened them momentarily with destruction”.

Whirlwinds

First, the storm blew almost directly from due West but changed about 3 a.m. to southward, with violent rain squalls. Sweeping up and sometimes down the streets the blasts collided and formed whirlwinds that quaked houses at their foundations. After 4 a.m. the storm slightly abated, yet still it raged furiously until daybreak, when it sank back to a heavy southwesterly gale that catastrophically continued throughout the remainder of Monday.

The crashes of those unnecessarily lofty chimneys, still an ominous feature of Dublin’s old-style architecture, caused many of the fatalities and much of the general damage. When the chimney of the Collins home at Sydney Avenue, near the railway, toppled, two of the servants were killed. Another, at No. 23 Clare Street, buried Mr. and Mrs. Whiston; he was killed: she was not expected to live. Chimneys killed an impoverished woman at Cork Street, a mother and child at New Row, on the Poddle, and two women at Williamstown. Many were tumbled in exposed areas such as St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion and Fitzwilliam Square. Throughout the country, too. the deathtoll row.

“Scarcely a house in the city has not been injured,” the Freeman’s Journal stated. All along Sackville (O’Connell) Street almost every roof was stripped, while slates and tiles whirled like blizzard-blown snow-flakes. Banged down by a gust, two men sustained broken legs there. Alone amidst the shambles of that thoroughfare. Nelson maintained his stony imperturbability, casting the blind eye on the tempest’s furious threats to down him. as he so invincibly did throughout the great storm of 1S22.

Trees ripped

On the gales roared. In Phibsboro almost every house was a total wreck. A portion of the wall at Botanic Gardens was burst outwards, crushing to death a policeman sheltering near it. Nine horses of Guinness’s brewery were killed when the wall of an adjoining yard was pelted into ‘heir stable. Thousands of trees were ripped up in the Phoenix Park. Others were torn from the banks of the Grand Canal. A storm-lashed Fly Boat foundered on the Grand Canal’s Portobello Harhour. Seriously hurt, two people were dragged from the ruins of No. 40 Dawson Street when the roof caved in.

In Dublin, as elsewhere throughout the country, the gale seemed to be singling out houses of worship for special damage. On its assault on Phibsboro church, great stones, each weighing over two cts., were blown far and wide. Part of the steeple of Donnybrook church was knocked down, and swept away was the ball on top of the spire of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Most horrifying of all the havoc in Dublin on that night of terror was the fire the storm blew up at the Bethesda church and schools, near Granby Row. It was feared that the entire area would be burnt down, and plans were afoot to have the structures blown up by artillery but these were later cancelled. At one o’clock on that morning the house across the street was levelled by the hurricane. Every vestige of the church and schools, as well as the residence of the Rev. Mr. Gregg was destroyed. Three artillery men were severely injured, and Inspectors Prendeville and Murphy grievously burned.

Burned

At Esker, near Lucan, the gable-end of a house Mas blown in, killing a mother and three children. Fire then broke out and a father and his son were terribly mangled and burned. A poor man in the neighbourhood, having saved all his family, excepting one child, after their home fell down on them, was carrying the little one away when both were blown to their deaths in a drain. A wake was being held at the home of the Gaynor family somewhere in that same locality when the house wen’, on fire. The corpse was cremated before it cou~d be dragged out. Also in the suburbs, Liord castlemaine was killed: he had been ill at his residence and was trying to fasten a window against the gale when a gust hurled him backwards to his death.

Escapes

Miraculous escapes occurred all over the capital. Part of No. 23 Holies Street was blown out into the road. No. 15 Erne Street was entirely demolished and with it portion of the adjoining home, yet no fatalities were reported from either wreck. When the roof of the china shop of Daniel Lawrence of 9 Nassau Street was blown in. the entire premises was smashed, burying his wife and children in its debris, yet all were rescued alive. Within four days the lucky Lawrences benefited from the generosity of their Dublin admirers to the extent of the then high sum of £400 and the subscription was still rising. Two families were uninjured when the Geraghty house in Aungier Street fell on them.

Remarkably lucky, too, were the soldiers in the guard room of the Vice Regal Lodge (now Aras an Uachtarain), for they still lived when a great tree tore down on it. When a squall whirled over the sentry box on Military Road, the soldier in it. also survived.

Strangest of all the escapes amidst the great gales in the wake of The Night of The Big Wind was this recalled by the Freeman’s Journal. As the mail packet Shearwater was steaming into Dublin Bay from Liverpool, the Captain saw near Dalkey’s rocks a plank, and clinging to it, a little boy. Picked up, the lad, about six years old. had recovered sufficiently at Kingstown on the following day to tell that both his parents had been drowned in the Irish Sea off a Liverpool vessel bound for New York, wrecked, as the paper said, about five hours earlier in the late awful hurricane. It was estimated that he had been drifting on those wild seas for about five hours.

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