The Allan Ryan Hospital, Ringsend

Allan Ryan

For many Dubliners the location of The Allan Ryan Hospital would draw a blank but it was an Important addition to the nation's capital and the aforementioned Allan Ryan was a controversial character. 

Lady Aberdeen

When Isobel Maria Marjoribanks married John Hamilton Gordon in 1877, she took on the title of Lady Aberdeen. Her husband, Lord Aberdeen, was a Liberal party member of the House of Lords. In 1893, he was appointed as Governor of Canada. While there, his wife became an active women's rights campaigner organizing the National Council of Women in Canada. 

 

In 1905, when the Liberal Party gained power in Westminster under Prime Minister Henry Campbell Bannerman, Lord Aberdeen was appointed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the couple departed Canada moving to Dublin and into the Vice Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park. Today the Vice Regal Lodge is Aras an Uachtarain home to the President of Ireland. 

As she had done in Canada, Lady Aberdeen made herself quickly acquainted with the state of women's rights in Ireland and what was needed socially and economically to improve women's conditions especially in the poorer part of the city she now found herself in. She became involved in and patron of the Women’s National Health Association of Ireland. In 1910, the association's primary focus was on the treatment and prevention of Tuberculosis, more commonly known at the time as consumption. By 1907, sixteen of every one hundred deaths were attributed to TB. 

 

In June 1909, the Aberdeen’s visited America. At a dinner held in their honour in New York, Lady Aberdeen met entrepreneur Allan A Ryan. Ryan was born in 1880 in New York, the son of one of the United States’s richest men at the time, transportation tycoon Thomas Fortune Ryan. Allan became a major player on Wall Street and it was at his zenith that he met Lady Aberdeen. She, without much persuasion, had Ryan agree to providing an endowment of £1,000 (€150,000) per annum for the following five years. Lady Aberdeen returned to a Dublin gripped by a TB epidemic especially affecting the poor and working-class areas of the city. 

 

In August 1910, with Lord and Lady Aberdeen in attendance, the Allan Ryan Home Hospital for Consumption under the auspices of the Women's National Health Association was officially opened at the Pigeon House just beyond Ringsend. It was located close to today's ESB power station on the banks of the Liffey. It was described as being a venue for the treatment of advanced but not hopeless cases of TB. Formerly part of Dublin Corporation's isolation building which had been used to treat patients during a smallpox outbreak. When the hospital opened it had eighteen beds but that quickly rose to fifty. The first patient was admitted on October 31st. Male patients were accommodated in two wards on the ground floor, while the female patients were on the first floor. There were thirteen staff including two physicians, a matron nurse, four nurses, a cook, a laundress and a number of maids employed from the locality. Four more shelters were then added to the Allan Ryan Hospital with the financial support of Lord John Lonsdale, secretary of the Irish Unionist Party. 

 

Lady Aberdeen also ran a number of fundraisers to fund both the hospital and babies club in Ringsend. One of the largest and most successful was held in Herbert Park. Along with the Allan Ryan Hospital, Lady Aberdeen used funds to build the Peamount Sanatorium.

 

On December 1st 1913, the running of the hospital was transferred to Dublin Corporation. While the hospital was for the treatment of those with TB, Lady Aberdeen also tried to persuade women especially, that prevention was better than cure. To this end she tried to educate the women in poorer areas including Ringsend that breast feeding their children was better than the often-tainted milk that was helping to spread the disease. She set up a number of what were called Babies Clubs including one in Ringsend. But with a growing national sentiment in Ireland the clubs were often treated with contempt and boycotted. The motives of Lady Aberdeen and Lonsdale were publicly questioned in newspaper letters from residents in Ringsend. Both the hospital and babies club were staffed by what was known as Jubilee Nurses, the forerunner of the district nurse. The Jubilee Nurses scheme was founded in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. One of the most important Irish jubilee nurses was Annie P Smithson who was both a nurse, an author and a staunch republican who was jailed by Free State forces in 1922 but rescued from Mullingar jail by Muriel McSwiney amongst others. Smithson was born on Claremont Road in Sandymount and was later secretary of the Irish Nurses Organisation. In February 1911, New York lawyer John Quinn sent £25 (€4000 in today's money) to Lady Aberdeen specifically to provide meals for the children attending Ringsend national school on Thorncastle Street.

 

Lord and Lady Aberdeen remained in Ireland until February 1915. Allan Ryan meanwhile speculated heavily on the stock exchange and went bankrupt in 1922. He was disowned by his father and received none of the $200 million that was left when Thomas Fortune Ryan died in 1928. He had heavily invested in a passion project, a car described as ‘the sexiest car ever made’ the Stutz Bearcat. For a certain generation you may remember the 1971 TV series ‘Bearcats’ starring Rod Taylor and Leslie Nielsen that featured a Stutz Bearcat. His failure was later seen as one of the markers that lit the way to the Wall Street crash in 1929. The Allan Ryan Hospital was returned to Dublin Corporation and closed its doors in 1955.

(c) The Ringsend and District Historical Society 2024