Children Of The Poor Clares (4 page)

The
Orphanage
and
Convent
buildings
were
structurally
separate
but
connected
by
doors
on
the
ground
floor
through
the
refectory,
and
on
the
first
floor
through
a
corridor
by
Our
Lady’s
dormitory.
They
were
not
connected
on
the
second
floor.
There
were
two
ways
of
leaving
the
building
from
the
second
floor
dormitories,
the
Sacred
Heart
and
St.
Clare’s.
One
exit
was
by
way
of
a
wooden
landing
and
down
the
wooden
staircase
to
the
ground
floor
and
then
along
the
corridor
beside
the
laundry
and
through
a
door
out
into
the
orphanage
courtyard.
The
other
exit
was
through
the
double
fire
escape
door.

The
twenty-five
members
of
the
religious
community,
under
the
Mother
Abbess,
Sister
Benedict,
slept
in
their
own
cells
in
the
Convent.
The
exception
to
this
was
Sister
Felix,
who
had
a
cell
in
the
Infirmary,
where
the
babies
and
very
young
children
slept.
Although
this
was
on
the
second
floor
of
the
Orphanage,
it
was
structurally
separate,
and
inaccessible
directly
from
the
dormitories.
It
was
reached
by
a
separate
flight
of
stairs
from
the
first
floor.
Sister
Felix
was
one
of
the
two
nuns
in
charge
of
the
children
then
in
the
orphanage.

The
Report
of
the
Official
Inquiry
was
to
state
that
the
fire
originated
in
a
smouldering
oily
deposit
in
the
flue
of
the
laundry’s
boiler.
This
had
probably
been
caused
by
the
wartime
use
of
turf
instead
of
coal
for
fuel.
The
fire
spread
through
a
leak
into
adjoining
timbers,
through
to
a
wooden
clothes
drier
inside
the
laundry
and
to
the
wooden
staircase
behind
the
laundry
wall,
the
staircase
itself
becoming
a
flue
for
the
fire.

The
following
reconstruction
of
the
events
which
took
place
between
approximately
2
a.m.
and
2.40
a.m.
on
the
morning
of
February
24,
1943,
is
based
on
evidence
given
at
the
Inquiry
into
the
fire,
the
Report
of
the
Inquiry
into
it,
newspaper
reports
and
conversations
with
a
survivor
of
the
fire
and
with
two
men
involved
in
rescue
attempts.

*       *       *

On the night of the fire, a small group had gathered in the kitchen of Sullivan’s general store. Warmed by the new Aga stove, members of the family and some of the staff were sitting up late over a game of penny poker. A young man called Louis Blessing was visiting for the evening. A local Gaelic football hero, he was courting Cissie Reilly, the attractive girl who worked on the grocery counter.

Across the yard, in the orphanage, the electric lights had gone out at 8.30 p.m. and in the convent building by 10.30 p.m. The flicker of candlelight could be seen for an hour or so in two of the orphanage windows. The weather was clear and there was a light breeze blowing. Soon the street lights were turned off, and the last Garda foot patrol returned to the station. Over the road in Fegan’s, a drapery shop, a foursome had returned at 1.30 a.m. from a badminton party. At ten minutes to two, James Meehan, the town taxi driver, arrived at the Farnham Arms hotel to collect a passenger but found that the man had decided to stay the night.

At 2.0 a.m. the group at Sullivan’s decided to call it a night. Cissie Reilly looked out of the window into the yard overlooked by the orphanage building to see what the weather was like. What she saw, billowing out of a vent in the building was smoke.

It was a few minutes later that Miss Bridget O’Reilly, the lay supervisor, asleep in her cubicle inside the Sacred Heart dormitory, was woken by the sound of voices. Mary Caffrey, a sixteen-year-old girl, knocked at her door. Miss O’Reilly opened it, as she was to say later, ‘a little bit’ and, on being told that there was smoke in the room, she instructed Mary and another girl to go to Sister Felix, one of the two nuns in charge of the eighty-two children in the orphanage. A few minutes later, Miss O’Reilly ran out of the room after the two girls.

The buildings were in darkness, and to get to Sister Felix’s cell, the girls had to go down the wooden stairs to the first storey, through a corridor and back up another flight of stairs. Mary tapped on Sister Felix’s door, told her there was smoke in the dormitory and asked for the keys to the laundry, the source, she thought, of the smoke. Sister Felix went into the convent, fetched some keys and gave them to Mary, who went off to the laundry. Meanwhile, a few older girls left the Sacred Heart to arouse others in St. Clare’s, the adjacent dormitory, and in Our Lady’s dormitory on the floor below. Miss O’Reilly arrived at Sister Felix’s cell and, the Sister said later, asked that the electricity be turned on so that the source of the smoke could be identified. This was done by Sister Clare, the other nun in charge of the children, who had already been woken and had come to Sister Felix’s cell.

When Sister Clare turned on the main switch, it lit up the buildings, and simultaneously the electric bell on the main convent door began to ring. Sister Felix went to the Mother Abbess’s cell where the keys to the street doors were kept. These she brought to Mary Caffrey who had returned from trying to open the door to the laundry. Mary was then sent to open the front door and the Sisters got dressed.

While all this was going on, a growing number of people out in the street had been shouting and pressing the doorbell in vain for five or six minutes. They had hammered and kicked at the heavy door, and someone tried to batter it down with an axe. Cissie Reilly had woken up John McNally, another young live-in assistant at Sullivan’s and they had been joined by others, including the young men working at Fegan’s who had recently returned home from the badminton party. Louis Blessing had already run up the road to the Garda station to alert the police and had returned. James Meehan, the taxi driver, hearing the commotion, drove down from the Farnham Arms, blew his car horn in an attempt to wake the nuns and then, urged by Blessing, drove off to get the steward of the convent’s farm, in the hope that he would have some way of entering the buildings. Just as they returned, Mary Caffrey was opening the convent door. They all rushed in and Mary showed some of the men to the laundry.

A scene of noise and confusion rapidly developed. With the exception of the steward, few of the rescuers had any knowledge of the layout of the buildings with their maze of inter-connecting rooms, corridors, stairways and doors, many of which were found to be locked. But John McNally did know that the fire escape was located over the wooden landing from the top dormitories. As he ran through the door, he saw a nun he recognised. ‘Get the children out,’ he shouted. ‘Get everyone out! This fire looks to be dangerous!’ She stood there and he implored her again, ‘For God’s sake, get them out or they will be trapped.’ ‘Try to put the fire out,’ she said. ‘But where is it?’ he asked and she pointed to the laundry door and said something about keys. ‘There’s no time for keys,’ he shouted and, telling her to stand back, he booted the door open.

A couple of other men were beginning to go up the wooden stairs towards the dormitories without realising that this was the direct route up to the children. But a voice which was never identified, called from further up ‘Go back down!’ Louis Blessing ran into the courtyard shouting, ‘Where are the children?’ and he and Cissie Reilly were directed by someone up the iron fire escape but, at the second floor, they were stopped by a locked door into the classroom. Blessing kicked at it, then tried to climb around it but failed, and they went down to find something with which to break it in.

After Miss Bridget O’Reilly left Sister Felix’s cell, she went back up the wooden staircase to the two dormitories on the second floor, and opened the door to St Clare’s where, as she later put it, ‘I was agreeably surprised to find that there was very little smoke. I then told everyone in the Sacred Heart, “You had better go into the other dormitory until we get the doors open and things fixed up.”

The sound of the girls running into St Clare’s roused the children there. One girl would later describe how, after she had been woken earlier, she got up, dressed and got back into bed with her head under the blankets, but her head ‘went funny’ and she got up again. ‘By then the smoke was bad. That Miss O’Reilly saw me trying to get over to the window. “Get down on your knees and pray,” she said. “Say an Act of Contrition.” But I couldn’t. I said I had to have air and crawled over to the window.’ Maggie Smith, the old woman who had been a pupil back in the 1870s, was seen coming in ‘very pale-looking’. She walked over to an empty bed and lay down.

Below, in Our Lady’s dormitory on the first floor, the children had been woken and told by Miss Harrington, the other lay teacher, to get out. They fled, coughing and crying down the wooden stairs and out of the building. Miss Harrington, having dressed, tried to go up the stairs to the second floor dormitories but found that the smoke was too thick. However, she told some of the older girls to ‘run up to St Clare’s and bring down the little ones.’ Eighteen-year-old Clare Shannon tried, but she could not get through the smoke either. Clare then went out of the building, made her way round to the fire-escape stairs and tried to get up that way. She found that these, too, were impassable and met Louis Blessing, Cissie Reilly and a policeman coming down.