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The
origins of the Curragh Camp
With the outbreak of the Crimean war in 1854 a requirement
for additional training areas for the British Army was recognised
as an urgent necessity by the government in London. Early
in the following year it was announced that camps would
be established at Aldershot in Hampshire and on the Curragh
of Kildare. The 5,000-acre plain in county Kildare had,
since the earliest times when the legendary men of the Fianna
were believed to have trained there, been a welcoming sward
to military men.
From the end of the 16th century onwards there are records
of encampment there, and by 1804 the success of the annual
summer mustering was confirmed when an extensive panorama
by graphic artists of the encampment was put on public display
in Dublin "bringing to the eye, as a view, a body of
16,000 troops". The camp was seen as a military and
social occasion, bringing together regular and volunteer
soldiers from all parts of the country, and attracting thousands
of spectators and camp followers. The influx of such great
numbers of men into the area brought advantages and disadvantages
to the residents of the Curragh and neighbouring towns,
and with the announcement of the making of a temporary encampment
of 10,000 infantry there in the spring of 1855 the residents
would have been conscious of the implications of the establishment.
The timber hutments were designed as temporary structures
which could be dismantled when they were no longer required,
but a few permanent buildings - the water works, racquet
courts and a clock tower, were also erected. During the
construction of the encampment the Irish and English contractors
employed hundreds of workmen who were accomadated in huts,
or might lodge locally. Two men who choose the latter option
were the Denvir brothers from Bushmills. They found lodgings
with a widow in her cottage nearby, and she provided food
which they took with them to the site. John Denvir, who
was later to join the Fenians in Liverpool, left an account
of his time on the plain in which he commented that amongst
the military "whether regulars or militia, they were
driven to wear the uniform by stress of circumstances, as
good Irishmen as ever I met".
The first huts were completed in record time, and by June
they were being occupied. The Lord Lieutenant and the commander
of the forces in Ireland General Lord Seaton made the sensible
suggestion that the ten squares of hutments should be numbered
and lettered as "such arrangement will be more convenient
for the soldiers in the camp, and more easily recollected
by them, then any system of names that may be devised".
But in the following month the men were not too happy in
their quarters as "the rain came in torrents through
the roofs which had split and rent in places during the
earlier warm spell".
The building of the encampment was creating wide public
interest. Crowds of people came by rail and road to visit,
and one journalist described, "approaching the Curragh
the visitor will perceive in the distance a long line of
low habitations, which bear a resemblance to what might
be supposed to be the city, or principle abode, of some
king or chief of an uncivilised race, such as we have seen
described by Mungo Park and other African travellers".
A soldier's view from the inside was that the camp was "a
goodish place sort of in dry weather, very healthy, but
after 24 hours rain, why then, it was ankle deep in mud,
like Sebastopol".
As the troops mustered on the plain, the camp followers
like-wise congregated there. Sutlers displayed their wares,
but sometimes these might cause problems: in 1857 the father
of a soldier complained t the commanding general that "immoral
pictures and jewellery to allure officers into debt"
were being hawked in the camp, but he would have been happy
to know that a colporteur was permitted to sell religious
tracts there.
Denis Barrington O'Sullivan, otherwise known as "the
wandering star" also visited the Curragh offering almanacs,
song books and holy pictures, and he might entertain the
men by composing humourous verse, or giving the solutions
to the puzzles in the almanacs which were then popular reading.
Smallholders from the neighbourhood brought their vegetables,
poultry and dairy produce to sell in the camp market while
farmers found good outlets for their hay and oats, horses
and cattle through the army contract system. Business in
Newbridge, a town which had developed entirely from the
building of the barracks there in 1814, prospered even more
from the population in the camp, while the car men who ferried
their passengers from the Currragh to the railway stations
in Kildare and Kilcullen, or to the nearby villages for
recreation, developed a constant trade.
Uncertainty as to the future of the encampment arose when
the war in the Crimea ended, but from lessons learned on
the battlefields it was decided that training camps should
be established at which the three arms - infantry, cavalry
and artillery - would train together. The Curragh was so
designated, and henceforth it was to be the seasonal training
ground for the army in Ireland. Each year thousands of men
rotated there during the drill period, while the resident
population of all ranks, their families and civilian employees
numbered about 4,000. Regular and militia regiments, met
there on the squares and on the sward of the plain, and
the major exercises which were held became important events
in the social calendar of not alone the county, but of a
wide area, including Dublin.
The withdrawal of the British army from stations in then
26 counties in 1922 was to have serious consequences for
the local economy, and this was especially so in the county
of Kildare. Apart from the loss to traders in Newbridge
and other towns, the contractors who supplied the barracks
with meat, dairy produce, fuel, fodder, and the numerous
other requirements of such a substantial and regularly paid
number of consumers found themselves without business. Civilian
workers, of whom it was estimated there were a thousand
during the Great War, and half that number normally, found
themselves unemployed. It was estimated that in 1887 the
presence of the military in Newbridge and the Curragh was
worth £300,000 per annum.
Courtesy of Con Costello and the Leinster Leader
20 July 2006
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