Children Of The Poor Clares by Mavis Arnold, Heather Laskey

‘because no case requiring ladders had ever arisen’ and, anyway, that the ‘whereabouts of the ladders was generally known on the night of the fire’.
     
    The failure of the council’s ladders had clearly been a contributing factor in the deaths of the children. It had taken a long time to locate the ladders and bring them to the fire. They did not extend properly or far enough, and they fell apart. The council employee responsible for their care and maintenance was Mr Thomas Smith, Weighmaster for the previous thirty years. He told the inquiry that he lived in the Market Yard building where ‘potatoes, oats, hay and such’ were kept. His job was to ‘weigh stuff’, keep the place clean, caretake and hire out the extending ladders. These, he insisted, were not for fire-fighting, though he claimed they were always returned to the market yard at night.
     
    He said that to get the ladders at night it would be necessary to rouse him, or rather his wife. “I sleep in the back and the woman sleeps at the front’, a piece of information which, together with his habit of speaking through his moustaches, produced guffaws in court. To wake her it would be necessary to shout because there was no bell or knocker. To the chairman’s question, ‘Did you ever think that the ladders might be wanted for a fire?’ Smith replied, ‘Well, you cannot foretell.’ He insisted that the ladders were in perfect order before the fire.
     
    (One of the men who had made rescue attempts told the authors that there was a carpenter still alive then in the town who had been paid to add four feet onto the ladders before they were inspected by a Dublin fire officer after the tragedy. We could not confirm this. However, at the Council meeting four days after the fire, great emphasis was placed on the fact that, upon the officer’s inspection, the ladders were found to be long enough to reach the dormitory windows, if properly extended. Moreover, Counsel for the UDC prompted the Weighmaster during his evidence to the Inquiry to say that the ladders were in the same condition at that moment as they were on the night of the fire.)
     
    During the evidence of three men—Louis Blessing, John McNally and John Kennedy, who had played brave and active parts in the rescue attempt—the UDC counsel tried to prove that they did not know how to use the ladders and had extended them wrongly. Both McNally and Kennedy insisted that the ladders had been pulled correctly, that they were used to demonstrating them in the course of their work in hardware shops, and that the ropes were off their pulleys. The chairman was overheard saying to Counsel in respect of McNally, ‘You are wasting your time. That man seems to know what he is talking about.’
     
    The town’s only official fire-fighting equipment was a hand-cart and some lengths of hose. When the hose was connected up to the street hydrant soon after 2.20 a.m. it was seen to be leaking in several places. The equipment was in the charge of Mr James Fitzpatrick, the town’s waterworks caretaker, and he was responsible for its maintenance. He told the tribunal that he had twenty-two years’ experience with fires and that the hoses were in ‘splendid condition’. ‘After a fire is over I take the hoses down and wash them and I test every length by itself and put it out to dry.’ Then he would leave it on the hand-cart.
     
    Fitzpatrick said that after the taxi driver, James Meehan, brought him to the fire, he supervised the hose which, on the advice of the convent steward, he played into the refectory ‘to keep the fire from getting into the main building.’ During his evidence he used phrases like, ‘I went out to see what was proceeding there’ and ‘there was smoke and a nice blaze coming out.’ He agreed that there had been a lot of talk about the fire in the town but said he did not join in ‘I have enough to do to mind the water’ and added that because he, Fitzpatrick, had been