Abstract
Lodging and boarding were well-established housing options which played an important economic and social role in early twentieth-century cities, yet there has been little academic study of the phenomenon in an Irish context. For many people arriving to Dublin in search of work, as well as for adults who were not in a position to establish a separate household, lodging was an important accommodation choice. Offering lodgings was also economically beneficial to householders. Drawing on a range of sources, including census returns, city electoral rolls, newspaper and other archival sources, this article will examine the demographic and socio-economic profile of lodgers and the households in which they resided in Dublin in the early twentieth century. A wide variety of arrangements and durations of lodging is revealed for the period centred on the 1911 census, suggesting that this form of accommodation appealed to a diverse range of individuals due to their economic or family circumstances, or need for mobility.
Introduction: The Lodger Phenomenon
Early twentieth-century Dublin was a troubled city, and one of considerable contrasts in terms of its housing. 1 Prosperous middle-class suburbs, including the southern areas of Pembroke and Rathgar, which were still outside the governance of Dublin City Corporation, contrasted with the congested central area. 2 The former boasted new single-family semi-detached homes with gardens front and rear, whereas the ageing fabric of housing in the city area combined with increasing levels of overcrowding to give an overall sense of decay. 3 Within the city proper, one of the most notable – if not notorious – features was the overcrowded and insanitary housing which was so prevalent throughout the capital. 4 No area seemed to be immune from the tenements, and even the more affluent districts of the city such as the Fitzwilliam ward had their share of broken-down slum dwellings, many of them hidden in the back lanes and mews behind the grand houses. 5 One-roomed tenements were a particularly problematic feature. Despite these huge variations in housing quality, all areas and social classes shared one thing in common – the lodging phenomenon.
Approximately one in twenty individuals in Dublin were recorded in the census of 1901 and 1911 as being lodgers/boarders. Subletting of housing, specifically by providing accommodation to non-family members within the family home, was a common occurrence which has been studied for a wide range of periods and locations. 6 To date, however, it has received only passing mention in an Irish setting, and this article begins to address that absence. Lodging appears to have provided a common solution to many very different problems. For example, what were the housing choices for migrants who arrived to the city in search of employment? In particular, what options were available to those who were adult, single and of limited means? What happened to individuals who, due to sheer poverty, were unable to set up their own households, or to even fairly well-to-do individuals without the protection of a family? These questions are explored in this article, which reveals the very different worlds of lodging across the early twentieth-century city.
Despite its prevalence, the practice of lodging was seen as socially difficult, particularly in middle-class circles. Davidoff has described the English case where ‘on the part of both lodger and householder, it [lodging and boarding] came to be considered a necessary evil and a sign of the loss of genteel status’. She cites the ‘ambiguous, mostly negative’ reactions to the practice in memoirs, novels and official reports.
7
This is also captured in a recent volume edited by Briganti and Mezei.
8
In the Irish context, similar responses can be identified in newspapers and short stories of the era. One 1905 advertisement captures this ambiguity: ‘Lady on Morehampton Road [an exclusive part of the city] will receive Paying Guest; no children or lodgers’.
9
In a short story published in the Irish Times, a character, somewhat embarrassed at ‘having to take lodgers’ for financial reasons, is reassured by a friend that: ‘As to taking lodgers, all the quality does it now’.
10
Affluent Pembroke Township was the setting for another short story published in the Weekly Irish Times which described the ‘feud of class and rank’ between two neighbours. One character had to take in “paying guests”, which the other lady spitefully referred to as lodgers, and was often making complaint of how the neighbourhood was being dragged down by people who could not pay their way without turning their houses into family hotels.
11
While direct factual references to lodgers are rarely found, some indications of the way of life can be gleaned from works of fiction. One particularly helpful source is James Joyce’s short story, ‘The Boardinghouse’, from his collection ‘Dubliners’, set around the turn of the twentieth century. 12 Its detailed depiction of daily life, including the interactions between residents and the parsimony of the landlady who ensures that scraps from the table are reused, while the sugar is kept under lock and key, provide a sense of what day-to-day existence might have been like for lodgers and boarders in Dublin.
In examining the role of lodging in the city, a number of key questions arise. To what degree were such living arrangements temporary and transitory or long term and stable? 13 Were lodgers generally in-migrants to the city or people at a particular stage of the life cycle, as Davidoff suggests? 14 It is impossible to answer such questions using the census alone, but by combining a number of sources it becomes possible to tease out some of these issues. The available sources used to uncover Dublin’s lodger stories include the 1911 census returns, which are available online in a searchable format; the digitised electoral rolls for Dublin city, currently available for 1908 to 1915 15 ; street directories; and online newspaper archives for the Irish Times, its sister title the Weekly Irish Times, Evening Herald, Freeman’s Journal and Irish Independent. When used in combination, it becomes possible to disentangle some of the complexity of the lodger phenomenon.
Before exploring the situation in Dublin, definitional issues and a brief overview of lodging at a national level are presented. In this article, both aggregate statistics and specific examples are used to examine the lodger phenomenon and the value and limitations of the available sources. The final section examines some suburban case studies, focusing on the neighbouring areas of Drumcondra and Glasnevin on the north side of the city, where lodger voters were especially prevalent. The evidence suggests that lodging was important to emerging lower middle-class households in the early twentieth century, playing a key role in the suburban economy.
Defining Lodgers
In definitional terms, it is difficult to disentangle the lodger and boarder. 16 The basic census unit was taken to be the family, reflecting an evolving narrative from the nineteenth century whereby the family, and the private home, was increasingly seen as ‘an idealized refuge, a world of its own with a higher moral value than the public realm’. 17 The convention was adopted in the census that boarders were part of the family of the occupier, where they shared a common table with the family and paid for their subsistence and lodging. By contrast, lodgers (who did not eat with the family) were to be counted as single families with their own separate census schedule. 18 However, it was recognised by the Registrar General that enumerators confused the two and were generally inconsistent in applying these terms. 19 In practice, other than dining arrangements, there may not have been much difference between lodging and boarding with a family. Certainly, newspaper advertisements of the period frequently give prospective tenants the option either to pay for ‘board’ or ‘dine out’, suggesting that there was no great distinction made within the family home. Similarly, census returns show both ‘boarders’ and ‘lodgers’ residing at the same address.
A variety of dwelling forms existed under the broad heading of boarding and lodging. Most of the examples discussed here relate to individuals residing in a private family dwelling, as lodgers, boarders or what were euphemistically referred to as ‘paying guests’. The distinction between a private family receiving one or a small number of lodgers and a premises which could be described as a ‘boarding house’ or ‘private hotel’ is somewhat blurred, as demonstrated below. Other lodgers subsisted in a variety of more institutional surroundings, both in the common lodging houses and their charitable counterparts. Given the ambiguity in the use of the terms ‘boarder’ and ‘lodger’ which is evident from the various sources, the term ‘lodger’ will be used hereafter as a blanket term to refer to all subtenants, except in cases where the varied terminology is particularly meaningful.
Lodgers frequently occupied the margins, in terms of their appearance in the pages of history and its sources, and often too in terms of their social status. 20 The census of population provides one of the rare points in the Irish historical record where they become visible. The 1911 census defined occupants of each dwelling on the basis of their relationship to the ‘head of household’, with ‘lodger’ or ‘boarder’ among the permitted responses. According to the 1911 census, there were 15,573 lodgers and 98,622 boarders across the island of Ireland, or 2.6 per cent of the entire population, almost two-thirds of whom were male. Distinct geographical variations in the proportion of lodgers and boarders (combined) at a county level, however, point to the largely urban nature of this form of occupancy.
Table 1 lists the ten counties with the highest proportion of boarders and lodgers relative to the overall population of that county. It is immediately apparent that Dublin county, which includes the city area, ranks first, immediately followed by county Antrim, which included most of Belfast city. Relatively speaking, boarders and lodgers appear to be less significant in the other large urban areas. Whereas Cork city and county accounted for almost 9 per cent of the island’s population, it was marginally under-represented in terms of lodgers and boarders, with just 8.4 per cent of the island’s total. The counties with the lowest proportion of boarders and lodgers relative to their overall population were generally the most rural counties, predominantly along the western seaboard.
Ten counties with the highest proportion of boarders and lodgers, 1911.
Source: Compiled from Census of Population, 1911.
As Dublin city and county was home to the greatest number of lodgers in Ireland, the remainder of the discussion will focus on the experience there. Over five per cent of individuals listed in the census returns for Dublin in 1911 were identified as either boarders (21,606 people) or lodgers (2,807 people). Indeed, Martin Maguire has observed that ‘taking in lodgers seems to have been an almost universal practice’. 21 The 1911 census returns allow a basic attempt to quantify aspects of the lodger phenomenon, although some limitations concerning reliability must be acknowledged. 22 In Dublin, more than two-thirds of boarders and lodgers were male (sixty-eight per cent), while – as one might expect – the majority were either single (seventy-five per cent of lodgers, eighty-two per cent of boarders) or widowed (fourteen per cent of lodgers, ten per cent of boarders). Lodging was frequently related to a youthful stage of the life cycle, as over half of all lodgers were aged between twenty and thirty-nine years, but across the city lodgers were recorded at all ages from infancy to extreme old age. The discussion below considers the available evidence for lodgers at various levels of the social hierarchy, beginning with the poorest cohorts and ending with the upper middle classes.
Ranking of proportion of boarders and lodgers relative to the total population of each county (1911). Source: Compiled from Census of Population, 1911.
The Variety of Lodging Experiences in Dublin, 1911
For the poorest classes, lodging either involved living with families in tenements or resorting to the common lodging house. As Mary E. Daly notes, the ownership structure of the tenements was complex: ‘it was not unknown for the weekly tenant [of a single room or group of rooms] to sublet either a room, or part of a room to a lodger’. 23 In 1911, seventeen families living in Mabbot Street and Tyrone Street, among the worst slums of the city, kept boarders. In fifteen cases, the family and lodger, frequently more than one, lived in a single room. For example, James McDowell, his wife, adult son, daughter-in-law, grandson and his three other children, shared a two-roomed tenement at 65 Mabbot Street with two boarders, Patrick Lynch and John Whelan. All were recorded as general labourers. 24
The other accommodation option available for the poorest classes was the ‘common lodging house’, also known as dosshouses or ‘low’ lodging houses. These establishments provided accommodation on a nightly basis and they excited great public concern due to the prevalence of overcrowding and the perceived moral dangers which they encapsulated. 25 A typical newspaper article from 1914, for example, draws on the language of Booth’s London in referring to ‘Dublin’s submerged tenth’ who lived in such accommodation. 26 The poorest quality lodging house accommodation appears to have coincided geographically with the worst of the one-roomed tenements. This was the case in the slum areas of Gloucester Street and Hammond Lane, where common lodging houses and overcrowded tenements dominated the streetscape. Unfortunately, the identification of common lodging houses in the historical record is not straightforward. 27 Although in the 1911 census some 111 individuals in Dublin, the majority of whom were female, described their occupation as ‘lodging house keeper’, most resided in leafy suburbs such as Rathgar where their middle-class ‘lodging houses’ were significantly different to the ‘common lodging house’ discussed above. While some buildings were listed as ‘lodging house’ in the Census Form B1, others are recorded in the same manner as private residences and their nature cannot be ascertained from the census returns alone. The ‘lodging house’ at 6 Talbot Place with fifty-four occupants on census night was probably a poor quality common lodging house frequented by general labourers. Neighbouring premises included a pawnbroker’s sale shop, restaurant, refreshment rooms and tenements. 28 The dwelling at 20 Pembroke Road, which was also enumerated as a ‘lodging house’, catered to an entirely different class of residents, comprising two widows and their paid companions. The head of household, Elizabeth O’Neill, was a barrister’s widow. Her neighbour at 18 Pembroke Road, Ellen Adams, declared herself to be a ‘boarding house keeper’ who had three lodgers, but the enumerator chose to record this as a private residence.
The disreputable nature of Dublin’s common lodging houses was highlighted in 1903 during the court case of Catherine Barrett who sued Dublin Corporation, claiming damages for trespass by the sanitary inspectors and for the ‘wrongful and malicious allegation that her house was used as a common lodging house’. 29 Evidence was presented that there had been complaints of overcrowding at her premises from 1901, when the sanitary inspectors found ten beds in one room and nine in another. Such crowding would certainly bear comparison with the ‘common lodging houses’ described above. However, Mrs Barrett disputed the accusation, saying that she was a widow and took in boarders, but never used the place as a common lodging house. Indeed, she claimed to call her place a ‘hotel’ in order to keep out ‘night lodgers’. The terminology used by Barrett highlights the subtle gradations in the status of different forms of lodging, and the particularly negative connotations of ‘night lodging’ in the ‘common lodging houses’, even for those whose accommodation was probably only marginally better in quality. The fact that she took the case, although she ultimately lost, also shows the value which this provider of lodgings placed upon her reputation and that of her establishment.
Using the census returns for 1901 and 1911, it becomes possible to piece together some of Catherine Barrett’s story. For this young widow, keeping boarders seems to have been an effective life strategy, enabling her not just to make ends meet and raise a family, but to achieve a certain improvement in social status for the next generation. In 1901, she was a thirty-nine-year-old widow with five children ranging in ages from six to nineteen years. The household enumeration for her address at 119 Great Britain Street (now Parnell Street) lists eleven male boarders ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty, three of whom were married, the remainder being single or widowed. They were generally engaged in skilled manual occupations, with occupations including a slater, painter, plasterer, upholsterer, compositor and cattle driver. In all, seventeen residents occupied the eight-roomed house. By the time of the 1911 census, Barrett had moved to a better house at nearby 39 Belvidere Place. 30 This thirteen-roomed house had seventeen occupants, of whom twelve were boarders (eleven male and one female). These boarders were generally of a higher social standing than those residing with Mrs Barrett a decade previously, including a veterinary student, insurance agent, ‘traveller’ (commercial salesman) and an individual ‘of independent means’. 31 Of her four surviving children, two were engaged in well-respected lower middle-class occupations including a national school teacher and a solicitor’s clerk. 32 By making her home into a business, Catherine Barrett could balance income and childcare needs, successfully raising her family and achieving a small degree of upward mobility in the process.
Given the perceived moral perils of the common lodging house, it was inevitable that well-intentioned citizens sought to provide alternatives. These were provided by a range of philanthropic organisations as well as by the city authorities. About 42,805 men annually availed of the Dublin Shelter for Men at 52 Poolbeg Street, which was specifically ‘intended to counteract the evil influences of the common lodging house’ by providing ‘clean, comfortable lodgings at a nominal charge for destitute strangers, men out of employment, and casual labourers’. 33 These institutions varied from the Iveagh House (opened in 1905), which provided purpose-built state-of-the-art accommodation for 508 single men as part of a larger project of improvement funded by the philanthropic Guinness (later Iveagh) Trust, to institutions akin to modern-day homeless hostels, such as the Night Asylum for the Houseless Poor in Bow Street, established in 1838. Over the course of the year 1908, this one institution provided lodging for 35,865 destitute persons. Dublin Corporation had itself provided a model lodging house as part of its Benburb Street development (1886–87), with ninety-nine beds available at 4d per night. 34 Young women arriving from the countryside, while not as numerous as their male counterparts, were perceived as being endangered by life in the immoral, vice-ridden city. As a result, a number of societies were established to meet young girls and provide them with somewhere to lodge until they could find their own accommodation. 35 These institutions were specific in their aims – they distinguished themselves from those providing accommodation for ‘penitents’ (generally in Magdalene laundries) and stressed the morally unblemished character of their charges. For example, the Episcopalian home at Charlemont Street catered ‘for young women of good character who had no friends with whom they could stay’. 36 Other homes, generally run on denominational lines, provided accommodation and training for young women who wished to become servants, 37 while still others accommodated servants who were between jobs – a significant problem for those who lived-in and had no alternative dwelling place. 38 Indeed Reverend Gilbert Mahaffy worried about ‘the squalid and demoralised surroundings of what are known as “servants’ lodging houses” in the lower quarter of the city’ and pointed to the value of the Young Women’s Christian Association in ‘saving young girls from the almost irresistible downward tendency of such circumstances’. 39 The evidence points to some landladies specifically providing for servants. ‘Comfortable accommodation’ for ‘ladies’ maids and high class servants’ was offered at 89 Lower Mount Street, according to one Irish Times advertisement. 40 Another establishment at 107 Leeson Street Upper accommodated four women who appear to have been disengaged or retired servants, presided over by seventy-four-year-old Sarah Dowling, herself a former servant. This is in keeping with trends recorded in England, where retired servants sometimes established lodging houses. 41
Servants were not the only group who found accommodation with their employers. The census records many ‘lodgers’ who lived over the shops in which they were employed. On Baggot Street Upper, for example, four confectioners and one shop assistant lived with their employer over number 10, which sold confectionery. An ironmonger’s assistant, Henry Kierans, lived with the extended Weir family at number 21, above their well-known premises, while the chemist’s assistant, John Ford, lived with the general manager and his family above the local branch of Hayes, Conyngham & Robinson. 42 A similar pattern is noted in suburban shopping streets, such as Morehampton Road and Drumcondra Road Lower, where grocer’s assistants lived above shop premises at numbers 134 and 140. 43
Lodging was frequently a choice for young adults who subsequently married and established their own homes, hence the predominance of individuals in their twenties and thirties. At the time of the 1901 census, Daniel Condon, a Limerick-born tram driver, was in his early twenties and lodging with the family of Thomas Slevin, a tram conductor, at 22 Morehampton Road. Ten years later, Condon was married with a small child and living at 5 Elmwood Avenue. Interestingly, while his own days as a lodger were over, Condon’s 1911 household included a lodger, Michael Whelan, who was a tram conductor. Clearly, lodgings in both cases were found through employment networks.
Although the majority were single people, 8.7 per cent of all lodgers in Dublin (2,133) were married. The census reveals married couples and entire families lodging with others. Dublin-born Charles and Frances Morris and their three young children were listed as boarders in the Spiller household on Chelmsford Road. Their circumstances are difficult to ascertain. It is possible that lodging was a more affordable alternative to the costs of establishing a separate household, although advertisements suggest that children were unwelcome in many lodgings. Financial troubles are unlikely to have caused dentist John Murray and his wife to choose lodging over establishing their own home. In other cases, the married individual, usually male, appears to be living away from family. This may be due to the nature of their work, but it is also possible that lodging was used in cases of marital breakdown.
Just inside the city boundary, Baggot Street Lower, according to the 1910 Thom’s directory, was occupied by a substantial number of medics and dentists, but also offered select lodgings under various descriptions: ‘furnished apartments’ (three) or simply ‘apartments’ (one), ‘private hotel’ (four), ‘furnished lodgings’ (one), ‘paying guests’ (one), and ‘private boarding house’ (one). 44 Despite the varied terminology used in the directory, the census returns suggest that there was little, if any, distinction between these types of accommodation.
Number 38 Baggot Street Lower, described in Thom’s directory as a ‘private boarding house’, but also listed under ‘lodging houses, furnished’, once again highlighting fluidity of terminology, had two occupants, Mrs Kate Wilson and Arthur E. Moore, dentist. In the 1911 census, three distinct families were enumerated for this address. This might suggest that the house was subdivided into tenements, but the household forms reveal a different arrangement. The thirty-eight-year-old widow Kate Wilson and her two servants (cook and maid), together with three female boarders, two of whom were recorded as a language teacher and a ‘photo artist’, occupied eight rooms in the house. They were distinguished in the census returns from two other individuals living in the same house but described, for census purposes, as separate households. 45 Both were relatively affluent; surgeon Herbert de Leik Crawford, aged twenty-six, and seventy-five-year-old Elizabeth Letitia Fausset (no occupation listed) each had two rooms in the house. The electoral rolls indicate that in 1908, Elizabeth Fausset (sic) had been paying £90 per annum for the front and back drawing rooms, part furnished, at 2 Fitzwilliam Street, another high-status address nearby. 46 It is highly likely that the distinction created in the census form between boarders and lodgers is illusory, and one can envisage the ‘lodgers’ mixing with the ‘boarders’ in the drawing room on Sunday afternoons.
The case of the widow Wilson draws attention to the gendered nature of this story; while males make up the bulk of the lodger/boarder population, there was significant involvement, on different levels, of lone females – ranging from rural-born women working as servants in the city to women of independent means. The census suggests that many single women who became boarders or lodgers had an independent income or relied on property investments. Some had never married, while others were widowed. Although almost two-thirds of lodgers citywide were male, proportions varied. Relatively more women were lodging in Rathmines (forty per cent of all lodgers) and parts of Pembroke West. The available evidence suggests that many of these were middle-aged women who had never married or were widows with means who sought ‘genteel’ accommodation as ‘paying guests’ with like-minded individuals. This same group was often responsible for providing lodgings to others, as suggested by the dominance of women in the census listings for both ‘boarding house keeper’ (eighty-seven per cent female) and ‘lodging house keeper’ (seventy-four per cent female). For women struggling to live within limited means, perhaps suffering from downward social mobility, taking in ‘paying guests’ could offer a regular source of income as well as potential companionship. This pattern has been found in nineteenth-century London, where lodging house keeping offered a suitable income for women without detracting from their respectability. Based on the age profile of female lodging house keepers, Alison Kay suggests that this may have been ‘the best option for middle-aged women who found themselves unsupported and without specialist training’. 47
Attracting Lodgers and Finding Lodgings
While it is likely that many individuals found accommodation by word of mouth and through informal networks, contemporary newspaper advertisements provide a flavour of the range of lodgings on offer to different sectors. 48 The advertisements also show how providers of lodgings were selective in their choice of lodgers, by specifying requirements for prospective tenants such as preferred religious affiliation or occupation. For example, in March 1910, an Irish Times advertisement offered ‘comfortable board and lodging’ to a ‘respectable tradesman’ in a private house for 15s per week at 29 Ballybough Road. 49 In another case, lodgings on Castlewood Avenue in Rathmines were offered specifically for ‘drapers’ assistants’. 50 Occasionally, accommodation was offered to undergraduate students. More frequently, Irish Times advertisers appealed to higher status individuals, specified as ‘suit gentleman’ or ‘businessman’, also mentioning ‘select accommodation’ with ‘highest references’ or inviting ‘paying guests’. The provision of references by both parties was an important first step in establishing a genteel paying guest relationship. Costs were rarely stipulated, although the term ‘moderate’ was sometimes used. Amenities noted in the advertisements included ‘electric light’, ‘bath’, ‘piano’ and, occasionally, ‘tennis’. The status of those offering accommodation might be mentioned, ‘clergyman’s widow’, ‘doctor’s daughter’, ‘gentlemen’s family’ and ‘good social position’. 51 Although Irish Times advertisers sometimes specified that ‘Protestant’ lodgers were desired, there was no general pattern of religious segregation in lodgings. 52
By contrast, advertisers in the Evening Herald generally targeted the skilled working classes. Typical wording in advertisements referred to ‘quiet’, ‘clean’ and ‘comfortable’ lodging for either ‘respectable’ or ‘working’ men. The availability of separate beds was sometimes specified, as this was not always guaranteed. In general, such accommodation cost from 2s to 5s per week, or 12s to 13s including board, at locations including the North Circular Road as well as the city centre, where accommodation was offered above shops. Tobacconist Ellen Dwyer supplemented the income from her business at 43 Capel Street by offering lodgings at 3s per week. 53 The 1911 census records four male lodgers, ranging in age from forty to sixty years, at this address. Their occupations were coachman, groom, carpenter and general shopman.
It is probable, but difficult to establish conclusively, that lodging offered a solution for individuals whose lifestyle departed from the accepted norm. There are intriguing possibilities of unconventional living arrangements being facilitated by lodging, as has been demonstrated elsewhere. 54 This is suggested in the possibly coded language of advertisements referencing ‘modern’ or ‘artistic’ households. 55
There was no one ‘type’ of individual who became a lodger. Instead, as this discussion has illustrated, Dublin had a diversity of lodgers from across the social spectrum. Their geographical spread reflects the broader socio-economic structure of the city, as lodgers tended to find accommodation with others of similar backgrounds. The final section of this article considers lower middle-class families in newer suburbs such as Drumcondra, who appear to have relied on lodgers to supplement their income and facilitate the rental or even purchase of respectable homes.
Suburban Lodgers in Drumcondra and Glasnevin
The newly-emerging neighbouring suburbs of Drumcondra and Glasnevin were brought under the jurisdiction of Dublin Corporation at the start of the twentieth century. Suburban development had taken off in the 1870s, and new housing was still under construction at the time of the 1911 census. The area was an emerging and aspiring suburb, mixed in terms of religious affiliation and social character, but predominantly lower middle class. For accommodation providers in the newer suburbs, having lodgers could be an economic necessity which made house purchase or employing servants possible.
From 1898, lodgers became entitled to vote in local elections, once they had reached the minimum age of twenty-one (for men) or thirty (for women), and provided they were lodging for more than twelve months at the same address, in accommodation valued at 4s weekly (£10 yearly). However, no actual payment of rent was necessary in order to claim the lodger vote. 56 The Dublin City Electoral Rolls reveal that the lodger electorate was very distinctive spatially. The city had twenty-one wards, and the number of registered lodger voters in each ward varied from less than 10 individuals (as in the case of Merchant’s Quay and North City wards) to peaks of 401 in Glasnevin and 618 in Drumcondra (in 1908). Although the overall numbers and proportions varied somewhat over the period from 1908 to 1915, between one-fifth and one-quarter of the lodger voters for Dublin city were registered in the Drumcondra ward, far out of proportion to its overall population size. In the same period, a further fifteen to eighteen per cent of the lodger franchise was registered in neighbouring Glasnevin. These two wards, combined, accounted for as much as forty-four per cent of the lodger franchise in the city in 1908.
Proportionally, lodger voters in Dublin, as a percentage of the total electorate, varied between four and five per cent in the period from 1908 to 1915. 57 The electoral rolls for 1910 record just 1,984 lodger voters for the city out of the full complement of voters (48,163), which in turn was under sixteen per cent of the overall population of Dublin city at the time of the 1911 census. The information recorded for each registered lodger included his or her address, name and address of landlord and voter number. Most usefully from the perspective of social and economic history, however, is the inclusion of details regarding the amount of rent paid, a description of the room(s) occupied and whether or not they were furnished. For example, the 1910 electoral register records landlord Patrick Fitzgerald at 18 Hollybank Road, Drumcondra, where his two lodgers, Jeremiah Ryan and William Sullivan enjoyed furnished accommodation, the former in the ‘return room’ at 9s weekly and the latter in the ‘top back bedroom’ at 25s monthly. The electoral register was finalised each December, and in theory the 1911 register should reflect individuals living at that address at the time of the census taken in April, given the one-year residency requirement. However, this was dependent on individuals re-registering annually. Yet, while Jeremiah Ryan was recorded at this address on census night 1911, he is absent from the 1911 electoral register. Nevertheless, the 1911 census provides a clear picture of the household. The head is forty-year-old Patrick Fitzgerald, a Limerick-born commercial assistant, who has been married for twelve years to Winifred, with whom he has one child, Mary Brigid. Also listed on this return is one ‘boarder’, Jeremiah Ryan, a forty-eight-year-old single commercial traveller born in Tipperary. Presumably the other lodger at this address in the 1910 electoral roll, William Sullivan, has moved to other lodgings. Ryan is still registered to vote at this address in 1915, indicating the longevity of this particular lodging arrangement. While this example shows some of the useful data on lodgers which may be obtained from the electoral rolls, it also suggests that their use is not unproblematic.
At a micro level, by examining a single street, it is possible to start to unpeel the layers of lodging in a suburban context. Hollybank Road, a street which straddles Drumcondra and Glasnevin, is located about one mile (1.6 km) north of the centre of Dublin and was developed in a piecemeal fashion from the late 1880s.
58
The earliest advert for houses on Hollybank Road appears in November 1888 when the appeal was ‘to small capitalists – safe investments, well built and let to respectable tenants’.
59
These were among the first houses on the street, judging by a slightly later advertisement from 1894 which points to the ‘two superior well-built modern houses’, numbers 17 and 19, for which the lease dated from 1892.
60
Batches of houses were frequently sold, as with numbers 95, 97, 99 and 101 which were advertised in 1896 as being well built of red brick, the only other apparently noteworthy attraction being the tramline.
61
As late as 1905, numbers 25 and 27 Hollybank Road were being offered for sale together as a ‘capital investment’: two well-built modern houses, in good order. Each contains three sitting-rooms, five bedrooms, hot and cold bath, servant’s room, kitchen, scullery, garden etc. held for 500 years, subject to £3 10 s per annum each and let at £40 per annum each, tenant paying taxes.
62
The framing of these advertisements suggests that most of the Hollybank Road houses were not sold to owner-occupiers, but rather purchased by investors who then let them to tenants. In turn, some of these tenants began to engage in various subtenancy arrangements, by taking in lodgers, to supplement their incomes or pay the rent. Some of the houses may have been occupied by the investors, however. By the turn of the twentieth century, aspiring homeowners could avail of a range of sources of funding for their house purchase, through building societies, banks and insurance companies. 65 A further stimulus was provided by the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act 1899, which enabled local authorities to advance loans for the purchase of existing houses (below a specified cost). 66 This legislation was to prove significant in the shifting pattern of housing tenure in Ireland over the course of the century which followed its introduction. 67 It is possible that some of those households taking in boarders or lodgers were stretching their means in order to undertake a house purchase.
The earliest advertisement relating to the practice of lodging identified for Hollybank Road dates from 1894, where a ‘gentleman can have large front room, bed and sitting room; cleanliness, attendance’. 68 In 1899, unfurnished rooms on Hollybank Road were on offer, complete ‘with use of a bathroom’ ‘at a moderate rate to a respectable couple’. 69 The notion of married couples choosing the comfort and lower costs of lodging rather than setting up their own home was seen as problematic in other countries. Mulholland notes objections to lodging and boarding houses in Britain on the grounds that ‘they encouraged transience and discouraged domesticity’. 70 Lodging also suited the growing numbers of young lower middle-class men and women coming to the city to work in the white-collar service sector, as suggested in the 1905 advertisement for ‘nicely-furnished apartments, suit business ladies or gentlemen, hot and cold bath’ at 3 Hollybank Road. 71 In 1910, a ‘comfortable, airy bedroom, use of sitting room, hot bath, moderate, 1d tram’ was being advertised at 17 Hollybank Road. 72 In fact, the 1911 census shows three lodgers – two male civil servants and a female dressmaker – residing at this address, together with forty-five-year-old widow Bina Tierney and her daughter Mary.
Of the 532 individuals residing in Hollybank Road’s 96 houses in 1911, some 45 were lodgers (i.e. 8.5 per cent), while 17 houses accommodated lodgers, just under 18 per cent of the total. Analysis of classified advertisements for houses on Hollybank Road in 1910 and 1911 suggests that rents and purchase prices had changed little since the houses were built. 73 The letting prices for houses ranged from £32 to £46 per annum. 74 Sales prices, where mentioned, were from £350 (for a quick sale) to £425 and £450, respectively (for two semi-detached houses with possession). 75 Based on these figures, the considerable financial contribution made to household income by lodgers becomes clear. Data from the electoral rolls shows that typical payments for board and lodging ranged from 5s per week up to 30s, with a median of 12s per week (i.e. over £31 per annum). 76 Even with only one lodger present in a household, and allowing for costs such as food and other services, the additional income provided was substantial in relation to rent or mortgage payments. The 1911 electoral rolls show that Michael Joseph O’Rourke paid his widowed landlady at 70 Hollybank Road 14s per week for board and lodgings. If Catherine Biggar was renting her house, the annual income of £36 from her lodger would have covered the rent. In the event that she was a homeowner, such an income would have paid for many household necessities. Similarly, John Troy’s £1 per week payment for board and lodging at 34 Hollybank Road would have comfortably covered the annual rental of the house. With a second lodger in the Rickard household, together with the income from the head’s employment as a shopkeeper, the family could have enjoyed a comfortable standard of living. At nearby 225 Clonliffe Road, the electoral rolls show that, between them, four male lodgers paid their widowed landlady a total of 42s weekly (for board and lodgings in three cases and ‘room only’ in the fourth). Her weekly earnings, therefore, would have exceeded those of a skilled building worker of the same period. 77
Widows were particularly dependent on lodgers to supplement their incomes. Almost one-fifth of widowed heads of household in Drumcondra ward received lodgers in 1911. However, many other household types were involved in subtenancy arrangements, suggesting that lodging was relatively common and that a great variety of forms of the practice existed. On Hollybank Road, for example, lodgers had the same occupation as heads of households and were employees, others came from the same rural location as heads of households, while others may have been distantly related. The households were sometimes headed by widows or single females, or by young childless couples, and sometimes comprised families of older, unmarried siblings. There was no one ‘typical’ lodger, in terms of age or occupation, nor was there a ‘typical’ host household.
In an area such as Drumcondra, and other similar suburbs, lodgers provided an important additional source of household income. It has also been mooted that the keeping of servants could be related to the lodger phenomenon.
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This was alluded to by a correspondent to the Irish Times in 1910, who bemoaned the fact that poor and less fortunate [girls], many of whom are taken from the workhouses, orphanages, and industrial schools [to become servants]…by people who can ill afford to pay the rents of the houses they occupy, but, for the sake of being respectable, are obliged to keep “paying guests” or lodgers, and of necessity a servant: but a cap and apron do not make a servant….
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Detailed analysis of the Drumcondra electoral rolls casts some doubt on the validity of those registered to vote under the lodger franchise. There are numerous cases where the ‘lodgers’ share a surname with their landlord, which suggests that they were not genuine lodgers, but rather were adult family members who could not otherwise qualify to vote as they were not householders. When the 1911 electoral rolls were correlated with the census returns for that year, some 324 individuals were found at the specified address (of a total of 485 registered lodger voters). Of these, just over one-fifth were ‘bona fide’ lodgers (67 individuals), while over three-quarters of registered lodger voters were related family members (247 individuals). The majority of these ‘false’ lodgers were adult children (193), while siblings (34) and other relatives (20) were also found. 82 Ten individuals who were listed as household heads in the census were found to have registered for the lodger vote. In addition to the abuse of the lodger franchise seen in the designation of family members as lodgers in order to obtain voting rights, it is noteworthy that of the ninety-three women who were registered to vote as lodgers in 1911, over half (forty-nine individuals) were under the official voting age of thirty years. ‘Bogus lodgers’ were not confined to the suburbs, although one newspaper article made particular mention of the prevalence of the practice in Rathmines and Clontarf. 83 An examination of 535 registered lodger voters in the eight wards on the southside of the city in 1910, identified over two-fifths as family members, while over one-quarter could not be found at that address in the census returns. 84 While allowance must be made for population movement, the frequent difficulty in identifying lodger voters in the census returns points to potential electoral fraud, which calls the accuracy of the electoral rolls into question. 85 The overwhelming dominance of the newer suburbs within the lodger franchise for the city is more an indication of a politicised group asserting their (doubtful) right to vote, rather than a sign of exceptionally high levels of semi-permanent (i.e. in residence for more than one year) lodgers. Unfortunately, therefore, the rich detail provided in the electoral rolls on type and cost of accommodation must be treated with caution. While it is quite likely that individuals related to heads of households who claimed a lodger vote were contributing financially to the household, there is no guarantee that the figures presented on their claims regarding rent paid are accurate.
Despite these limitations, Dublin’s lodger franchise reveals an aspect of urban life which is difficult to examine by other means. If caution is employed and related family members are excluded, it is possible to gain a sense of the impact of lodgers within individual households. For example, Iona Road which straddles the Drumcondra–Glasnevin boundary was still under construction in 1908 when the lodger register was compiled. In number 4, Mrs Jane McGuinness earned £1 per month (i.e. 20s) from the lodger in her furnished front room, John O’Shaughnessy, while she provided Joseph Molloy, the occupant of the furnished back room, with partial board and lodging for 7s per week (i.e. 28s monthly). 86 In a neighbouring street, Edward Walker paid 25s weekly (i.e. 100s/£5 monthly) for board and lodging to Miss Annie O’Neill for a furnished back room at 3 Lindsay Road. Two doors down at number 7 Lindsay Road, William Stack lodged in the ‘top back and front unfurnished’, for which he paid 5s per week (i.e. 20s/£1 monthly) to landlord Thomas Murphy. James W. Redmond, the lodger at 12 Lindsay Road, had a furnished front bedroom at £60 per annum (equivalent of £5 monthly) from landlord Samuel Walton. Note the range of different arrangements, from unfurnished rooms, to weekly board and lodgings, to an annual rate of payment, all of which provide clues as to the degree of security or permanency of these subtenancies. Those paying up to £5 monthly were also clearly supplementing the living costs of the household, given that builder Alex. Strain was advertising a ‘bright house’ on Lindsay Road for £48 per annum in 1911. 87
Combining the electoral register information, which provides names and addresses of lodgers and landlord/landlady, accommodation types and financial arrangements, with the census data, which list age, occupation and marital status, broadens our understanding of both lodger and host. Checking the 1911 census, Edward J. Walker (who lived with landlady Miss Annie O’Neill in 1908) is listed as a boarder on Crawford Road, an earlier name for part of Iona Road, in a substantial nine-roomed property. Walker was a fifty-one-year-old single man employed as a compositor and born in county Carlow. He resided with the O’Neill family, which comprised national school teacher Annie, a single woman of forty-seven years, her brother John, a sixty-nine-year-old retired teacher, and their thirty-year-old servant Mary Anne Brady. This indicates the long-term nature of the lodger relationship, with an ongoing subtenancy of at least three years. Significantly, the household was located at 3 Lindsay Road in 1908, but had moved to 8 Crawford Road by the date of the 1911 census. Walker remained with the family through this change of address. A similar long-standing relationship is evident in the case of lodger James Redmond and the Walton family mentioned above. The census reveals that sixty-four-year-old widower Samuel Walton, a Methodist retired draper, and his two adult daughters were still living on Lindsay Road together with their boarder, fifty-five-year-old James Redmond, in 1911, as they had done in 1908. Armagh-born Redmond was an unmarried member of the Church of Ireland who managed a flour mill. The cases of Walker and Redmond show that lodging could be a longer term dwelling choice. This is suggested by the many newspaper advertisements which offer ‘permanence’, but can be demonstrated conclusively by combining the evidence of the electoral rolls and census returns. Lodging was not just associated with those who were young and mobile, but could provide fixed accommodation for an older demographic.
Conclusion
Due to their often transient nature, many lodgers may be completely absent from the historical record, unless their occupancy happens to have coincided with an enumeration such as the census. The limitations of the sources help explain the lack of inquiry into lodging in Dublin, despite the fact that one person in every twenty in the city was a lodger in 1911. This article has begun to bridge this gap using a range of digitised materials, including newspaper archives, census data and electoral rolls, together with contemporary street directories. In combination, these sources can address some of the key questions which were raised at the start of this article, beginning with the nature of housing choices for individuals who arrived to the city in search of employment. Depending on their employment, many in-migrants to the city ‘lived-in’ either as domestic servants or shop assistants who occupied accommodation over the premises, frequently sharing with their employer, their family and other colleagues. Others lived with relatives, as is suggested by the census returns. 88 Some young women availed of the services of charitable homes which provided training as well as accommodation. For the remainder, lodging with a family was a very common choice. Newcomers in white-collar employment tended to locate in areas of a similar social class, such as the emerging suburbs of Drumcondra, Glasnevin and Rathmines. The vast majority identified such lodgings by word of mouth through informal networks, although prospective tenants occasionally placed classified advertisements in newspapers, or responded to those of accommodation providers.
Lodging was an option for individuals of all social classes. Adults of the most limited means could pay a nightly rate to stay in a common lodging house, which also suited the most transient populations. Cheap accommodation could also be found by sharing lodgings with a family in a room or rooms within a tenement house. Higher up the social scale, lodging offered a degree of stability and home life to people without their own family. Such living arrangements could be long-term and not merely temporary and transitory. Lodgers were not always in-migrants, nor were they all at a youthful stage of the life cycle.
For women without the protection of a male relation (including widows, deserted wives and never-married women), offering lodgings was a safe, respectable means of earning a living which could, where necessary, be combined with raising a family. The economic benefits of taking a lodger could be considerable, as demonstrated for Drumcondra, where the typical annual income from just one lodger was broadly equivalent to the rent for a reasonable suburban dwelling. It is likely that offering lodgings was a useful supplement which contributed to mortgage repayments, as in the modern-day ‘rent a room’ tax relief scheme. Unfortunately, sufficient data are not currently available to test these assumptions more fully.
The diverse social stratification of Dublin city in the early twentieth century is reflected in the huge range of lodging arrangements that were enjoyed by different social groups. With the exception of a degree of moral panic around common lodging houses, other forms of lodging were accepted as part of everyday life. Despite the suggestion, conveyed through newspaper coverage, of some slight nervousness, and indeed mild titillation, at the notion of taking strangers into the family home, in fact these lodgers were generally well vetted in advance of their arrival, either through the networks which had connected the interested parties or by way of references. Indeed, the available evidence for Dublin accords with Baskerville’s study of Canada, which suggests conceptualising lodging as the taking in of familiar strangers, men and women who, while not personally known to their new hosts before their arrival, are in the more general sense of class, religion, occupation, and ethnic background very familiar and compatible and not strange at all.
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Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Associate Professor Catherine Cox in her editorial capacity, and two anonymous referees, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The author would also like to express her thanks to Dr Arlene Crampsie for her advice and encouragement.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.