Children Of The Poor Clares (5 page)

These three had been up the fire escape stairs a second time, bringing a mop to batter down the doors at the top, but by then the smoke was very thick and when they got up to the top storey all the lights fused, plunging the buildings into total darkness. By the time they broke through into the classroom, they could scarcely breathe. Just as they reached the double doors of the fire-escape, they opened, and Mary Caffrey came out, gasping for breath, followed by gushes of thick smoke. They could hear children crying and calling out that they were burning, but they did not know where to find them in the smoke and darkness. In fact, they were separated from the door to St. Clare’s by only 7ft 6in of the wooden landing but they could only grope their way back down.

Rescuers were trying to get into the buildings from any possible point of access. One Sister tried without success to open a courtyard door to let people in, and then, going into the convent parlour, she found a man breaking the window. The nun who was the convent bursar tried, at one point, to get up the wooden stairs past Our Lady’s dormitory, but was forced back by the smoke. She said she was about to attempt the iron staircase but, hearing knocking at a door from the street, she went back down to try to open it. Inadvertently, she knocked down the bolt and called to the people outside that they should try another door to the courtyard. She said later that she then went to show some men where to get water and did not again attempt the iron stairs.

Sister Felix would later describe how, after she had fetched the keys for the door to the street for Mary Caffrey, she then went up to Our Lady’s dormitory to get the children out, but found nobody there, Miss Harrington having already told the children to leave the building. ‘I went up no further because I think Mary Caffrey called to me for the keys of the new buildings.’ On this bunch of keys was the one to the fire-escape doors. Sister Felix saw Sister Clare, told her that Mary Caffrey wanted that bunch of keys and then she herself tried to get up the iron fire-escape stairs, found the smoke very dark and was met by a man coming down who told her that she would need a gas mask to get up. Sister Felix then returned to the Infirmary and helped some of the older girls to take the babies and little children who slept there to safety. Although the Infirmary was on the second floor, it was structurally separate from the two dormitories, and its exits were on the other side of the building.

Mary Caffrey, now holding the bunch of keys given her by Sister Clare, made her way up the wooden stairs. She was seen outside Our Lady’s dormitory by another girl, Una Smith, fumbling for the right key to the fire escape door. Then Mary felt her way up the wooden staircase to the top storey. It was then that the lights fused, again plunging the building into darkness. Mary unlocked the double fire-escape doors, and, gasping for air, called to the children to come out, that the doors were now open. It was after this, when she came out onto the exterior iron landing, choking and coughing, that she was seen by Blessing, Cissie Reilly and the gardai.

Una Smith, a sixteen—year-old who slept in the Sacred Heart dormitory, had woken too late to hear Miss O’Reilly’s order to go into St Clare’s. She left the room and was halfway down the wooden stairs when she saw and spoke to Mary. Realising that other children might be still asleep, she went back up through the hot, dense smoke to the Sacred Heart dormitory. Groping her way around the six rows of beds in the dark, she managed to find Dolly Duffy, who was somewhat deaf, still there and woke her. Una then got out through the now open emergency doors to the fire escape, the only person, apart from Mary to do so, while Dolly, after saying an Act of Contrition, put her apron over her head and went down the wooden stairs. She was the last person to escape this way. When she got out, the soles of her shoes were seen to be alight.

The dense smoke was now giving way to flames which, fanned by open doors, were spreading from the laundry wall timbers through the wooden stairs, the refectory, the kitchen and the classroom under St Clare’s dormitory where over forty children were now trapped.

Earlier, at the nuns’ request, John McNally and his friend, John Paul Kennedy, one of the young men from Fegan’s shop, had tried to attack what seemed to be the source of the fire, the laundry clothes drier, with fire extinguishers brought from the refectory by the nuns and Miss O’Reilly. When they were emptied, the men came out gasping for air. One of the nuns begged McNally ‘like a good boy, try and go in again.’ He asked for a wet cloth and Monaghan, the convent steward, tied it round his nose and mouth. Armed with fresh extinguishers brought from Sullivan’s store, Kennedy and McNally went back into the laundry where, by this stage, the wooden walls were crackling with flames. McNally collapsed unconscious and Kennedy dragged him out of the room into the courtyard. Kennedy then went up the wooden stairs as far as Our Lady’s, but by then the stairs farther up were already burning. When McNally recovered, he was horrified to learn that despite his entreaties to the nuns when he had first come in, the children were still in the building. Directed by the convent steward who said to him, ‘The kids are up there’, McNally shouted for keys and tried to get up the iron stairs, but by then the smoke was too thick.

Members of the town’s fire brigade had by then arrived on the scene with a handcart and some lengths of hose which were in charge of the town waterworks caretaker. They had been brought to the fire by James Meehan, the taxi-driver. When the hose was connected to the standpipe out in the street, it was seen to be leaking so much that there was little pressure in the water coming out of the nozzle, and was therefore useless.

Inside St Clare’s, forty feet up from the ground, the older girls realised that they were trapped in the burning building. They made increasingly desperate attempts to get the younger children out of the door, but each time they opened it, the black smoke poured in. One of these girls was fifteen-year-old Kathleen Graham from the Sacred Heart. She had woken too late to hear Miss O’Reilly’s order to go into St Clare’s, but had gone there anyway to look for her seven-year-old sister, Bernadette. She could not find her.

When seventeen-year-old Veronica MacManus looked down from a window in St. Clare’s into Sullivan’s yard, she could see flames coming from the classroom windows below. In the yard people were shouting that ladders were coming, and she knocked on the window to attract their attention. Then she sat on a bed. Smaller children gathered round her and, coughing with the smoke, she began to lead them in a decade of the rosary: ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’

Below, the yard was filling with people, clamour and turmoil. When the various attempts to reach the children from inside the building had failed, several of the men, including a policeman, had run through the unlit streets to the Market Yard where they knew the town council kept ladders, and tried to rouse the caretaker. There was no bell to his quarters, and after much yelling and shouting, a window opened and, after a further delay, keys were thrown down only to be lost in the dark.

While this was going on, Louis Blessing had found a bicycle and pedalled furiously up to the Central Hotel where he and several other bachelors in the town had rooms. One of them was Mattie Hand, who, as an electrician with the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), had a van with extending ladders. Blessing ran in shouting and roaring, and pulled Hand, who at first thought Blessing was joking, out of bed. While Hand dressed, Blessing cycled back to the Market Yard where he found people still stumbling around trying to find the ladders. He smashed open a door and, after more searching without light, they were located and a gang of men ran them over to Sullivan’s yard.

Louis Blessing later described the scene in the yard: ‘The panic of the children seemed to be much worse then, and the whole place was pandemonium with the crowd and the children shouting, the glass and debris and pieces of slate and stuff coming down. The three windows were full of children. They seemed to have used every spot they could to sit on and hang on to.’

Kathleen Graham, who had gone into St Clare’s to look for her younger sister, would remember that it was during the saying of the rosary that the children began to scream. With another girl she went to the door to try to get out. When they opened it, they were overwhelmed by smoke. On the way back, the other girl, Mary Lowry, dropped to the floor, and Kathleen crawled under the beds to the window.

When Veronica MacManus was halfway through the third decade of the rosary, she could go no further. She and one of her closest friends, seventeen-year-old Ellen McHugh, looked out of the window and saw men putting up a ladder against the wall, short of the window. ‘Look’, cried Ellen, ‘Oh, look! It doesn’t even reach the window. How will we get down?’ Ellen and another older girl then made a last desperate effort to reach the door, but, as soon as it was opened, flames burst in. Neither girl was seen again.

The rescuers had now been joined by a squad of soldiers stationed at a barracks in the town. They had been formed up on the parade ground and quick-marched in formation down the main street to the fire. Flames and smoke were billowing out of the orphanage windows. The terrified children were sobbing and screaming, called out that they were burning, begging to be taken out. They saw the men struggling to extend the ladders. One went up partially but did not reach the window and came off the pulleys. The other had its ropes tied around it. The men got them untangled but still it would not extend. They lashed the two pieces together but as it went up, they too swayed and, under the children’s eyes, fell apart.

At about this time the wooden staircase up to the dormitories collapsed. Louis Blessing later told how all he could see then ‘framed against a background of flames was a sea of childish faces against the windows. I could hear them praying and coughing and calling, “Get us out, we are smothering.” I think that the smaller ones who could not reach up to the window for air had no chance and must have been overcome at an early stage.’ ‘The floors were all waxed’, said John McNally, ‘They went up like a tin of petrol.’

The men were calling to the girls to jump from the window. The first to do so was Veronica. She was sitting on the windowsill and when she saw flames coming from a cupboard at the far end of the dormitory, she just seemed to dive out of the window. Blankets were held out below but she crashed to the ground, breaking a hip and damaging an eye. A little girl jumped after her but she slipped through Blessing’s outstretched arms and smashed her legs. Another fell on to a lean-to shed, bounced off it and hit the ground. After this, the other children were seen to draw back.

Miss Harrington, the teacher from Our Lady’s dormitory, was standing nearby. Earlier she had been calling up to the girls, ‘Be quiet! Ladders are coming.’ She couldn’t, she explained later, ‘bring myself’ ‘to touch one of the little girls when she fell. It was Dolly Duffy, the last girl to come down the stairs, her clogs alight, who picked the child up, and carried the her to the hospital.

McNally, Meehan and a soldier then got a section of a council ladder and put it on the lean-to shed. McNally went up it and persuaded a girl to jump across the gap into his arms. About three children got out this way, but when the last child jumped, McNally lost his balance, he and the child fell on the shed roof and the ladder crashed to the ground. When McNally went up the ladder again and called, there was no reply from the window.

A survivor who was clinging on to another windowsill later described the horrific scene inside the dormitory. ‘The window was hot. The glass was cracking. The floor started to go, there were wardrobes and beds disappearing into the flames. I saw one girl lying unconscious on her bed, the clothes on her back on fire. Then she disappeared. Sisters were crying for each other with their arms outstretched. The two Cassidys were calling for each other. Then the floor where they were disappeared.’

When Mattie Hand, the ESB worker woken by Louis Blessing, arrived, his ladder was extended in seconds. He went up and began to bring down five screaming, choking, half-suffocated girls who were still clinging to a window sill. One of them, seven-year-old Bernadette Graham, whose sister Kathleen had earlier failed to find her, pulled back in terror into the room. There were only about eight feet of floor left. Theresa Brady, who was thirteen, went after her and, when Bernadette tried to wriggle out of her grasp, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her towards the window and took her down the ladders to Mattie Hand. Bernadette’s back was badly burned, but she survived. Theresa was the last girl to come out alive.

Dr. John Sullivan, brother of the Sullivans who owned the store, had the impression that there were still other children in the room, so he climbed up the ladder. ‘When I got up abreast of the window, it was pouring smoke. It got in my mouth and eyes and I only had time to try to have a look through. I got the impression that there was a heap or a pile of children about the level of the window… there were cries coming from it… It was pretty bad and I came down a step or two on the ladder to get air. I got under the sill of the window and stayed there for a couple of minutes to recover. During that period I could hear general crying or moaning coming from all over the room. I got up again to see if I could do anything, then I felt a bit weak and I came down. I would have tried to get in if it were possible.’

As Dr Sullivan came down the ladder, flames burst through the windows of St Clare’s dormitory. There was a terrible sound of crashing timbers. The time was approximately 2.40 a.m. It was later officially estimated that from the time the smoke was first discovered, inside the building, there had been a period of at least fifteen minutes during which all the children could have been safely evacuated.