A living, breathing story of a city

“WHERE did you get that child?”“I got it in Mallow Lane.”“How much did you pay?”“I got the child at a bargain rate of three pence a day.”“You were badly caught.

Sure, I could have given you two beautiful cripples for only four pence.”Thus ends an exchange between two professional beggars on the streets of Cork in the 1850s and recorded shortly after in a pamphlet written by the exotically named Valentine Everybody.

To most Corkonians, this represents a faded fable, hardly worthy of note, but to historian Michael Lenihan it is part of the lore of Cork, a living, breathing account of what the city was really like long ago, rather than what the leaden history books tell us.

Ask Mr Lenihan about the laneways of his native city and you might need to pull up a chair. If you want him to describe his favourite Cork character, though, you had better be prepared to take the day off. “Dr Baron Spolasco is my favourite. He was an amazing character, a chancer of the highest order,” he says.

Spolasco was a notorious quack during the early 1800s, offering miraculous cures for all kinds of diseases and afflictions. The baron printed leaflets offering “life preservers” which he claimed had the effect of keeping those who used them hail and hearty.

“He practised in Cork for a time,” says Mr Lenihan, warming to his theme. “He was peddling his wares in Limerick in 1837 and then set off for Cork, to, as he put it, ‘afford the sufferers the benefit of my cures in the most unyielding cases’ which other practitioners had pronounced incurable.”

The baron did well for a time in Cork, but, eventually, his quackery caught up with him. In danger of being exposed, Spolasco headed for Wales, on board the ill-fated paddle steamer Killarney which sank, claiming the life of his son. Undaunted, he settled in Glamorgan but had to flee to the US after being convicted of manslaughter by issuing medicine ‘highly injurious’ to a patient who died as a result.

Aptly described as a tale of ‘charmers, chancers and cute hoors’ Mr Lenihan’s book Hidden Cork, is replete with the weird and the wonderful side of the city by the Lee. His home in Douglas is crammed with a lifetime of collecting books, pamphlets, postcards and periodicals relating to Cork.

“It’s just pure madness,” he says. “I come from a family of collectors. One of my brothers collects stamps, the other collects, of all things, bank notes. I got into collecting books.”

He will now have to add Hidden Cork to the hundreds of books he has gathered already, hoping that, in time to come, it will, too, become a collector’s item. “The fun part of writing it is was in the research. It involved constant digging, but I was determined to offer a different slant on Cork history and a different way of telling it.”

* Hidden Cork by Michael Lenihan is published by Mercier Press and is in the book shops now. A launch of the book takes place at the old Cork City Gaol on Thursday next at 7pm.