Custom House, school, gallery and hideout: The characters of Emmet Place and the Crawford 

THE oldest building at Emmet Place has served as an office for British intelligence, customs men, a family home, an art school, as an IRA hideout and, oh, an art gallery.

Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery was originally constructed as the old Cork Custom House between 1723 and 1724.

The gallery is home to the famous Canova Casts, which were gifted to the city two centuries ago and feature works by many well-known names such as Harry Clarke and Jack B. Yeats as well as more contemporary artists such as Eilis O’Connell and Gerard Byrne.

Perhaps lesser known however are the names of the residents of the iconic building before it became the Crawford Gallery.

William Maynard (1690-1732) Collector of Customs

At the time of the Custom House’s construction, the man in charge, and effectively the most significant representative of the British crown in Co. Cork, was a man called William Maynard.

Born in 1690, he was perhaps not the kind of chap Corkonians alive today would have much in common with.

He was a loyalist volunteer and an enemy to the Catholic faith.

His career started brightly with an education in Trinity College Dublin, and he became MP for Tallow at 23.

In 1717 he organised for the dismissal of the man responsible for collecting customs in Cork and took over his position instead.

Extensive lobbying led to the construction of a new Custom House in 1723-24 and Maynard and his family moved in to a residential wing on the north side of the new building where he could see the traffic on the river.

Unfortunately, for him, he appears to have become entangled in the debts of his aristocratic father-in-law; additionally ‘many notorious frauds in the Customs’ were found, with the result that he fell quickly from grace. He died in 1732, leaving a wife and daughter.

Bernard Shaw (died 1808) Collector of Customs

Bernard Shaw was the younger brother of Sir Robert Shaw, a Dublin MP.

Like Maynard, he was a true defender of the British crown, and when the French were rumoured to be invading in 1796, he enlisted as a Captain in a volunteer regiment.

In 1797, he married a local girl, Jane Westrop, and quickly had several children.

The family divided their time between their rooms in the Custom House, where at least one of their children was born, and Monkstown Castle.

One of his daughters caused a stir when she appeared on the stage in 1830 – not at all what respectable ladies were expected to do!

Bernard is said to have died in his carriage on a journey to Monkstown.

He appears to be a distant cousin to the dramatist George Bernard Shaw.

William Willis (or Willes, died 1851) first Head of Cork School of Art

After the government had moved the offices of the Customs and Excise department to the new Custom House on Lapp’s Quay in 1818, the building on Emmet Place became vacant.

In time it was granted to an organisation called the Royal Cork Institution, who set up a science lecture theatre where the present café is situated, and installed a set of plaster casts in the attic for students to study.

These had been made in Rome at the start of the nineteenth century.

In time, the Institution faded away – especially after the founding of what is now UCC, which made the older organisation obsolete.

In an attempt to improve Irish industry, the British Government ed an Act of Parliament to found a school of design in Cork in 1848, with an annual grant of £350.

The school opened in January 1850 under the headship of William Willis.

Willis was a late developer who had studied medicine as a young man, not starting to paint seriously until he was in his thirties, but he was accomplished enough to be accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

His belief that a solid foundation in anatomy was an essential part of the artist’s toolkit is evident in the very many anatomical drawings credited to him that remain in Crawford Art Gallery’s collection to this day.

In 1853 the British government withdrew its grant. Fortunately, the school was saved when the taxpayers of Cork stepped in to fund it.

Mary (1878-1921) and Francis Giltinan (1878-1938)

The Custom House/Art School continued to act as a family home until at least the 1920s.

One of the last families to live there was that of Francis Giltinan, who was then the hard-working secretary of the body that ran Cork’s technical education.

In 1911 he lived in the school with his wife Mary, son Donal and a maid, Ellen Kingston.

Tragically, Mary died at home shortly after giving birth to a daughter, also named Mary, in April 1921. She had previously lost a child.

Whilst deaths related to childbirth were not uncommon at the time, even in middle-class families, it would have been unusual for a single father to raise a family alone.

The following June, Giltinan re-married, this time to an Ellen Harrington who went on to raise a number of children with him. In 1930, Francis became the first CEO of the Cork Vocational Education Committee.

Seamus Fitzgerald (1896-1972) IRA man in art school hideout

Many Cork people would have been familiar with Fitzgerald’s Electrical shop on Grand Parade.

Fewer would know that the founder of the business was a leading entrepreneur and Fianna Fáil politician and TD in the first Dáil, Seamus Fitzgerald.

Long before he was a respectable businessman, he was put in charge of Dáil intelligence in Cork city, tasked with the mission to collect witness statements following the Burning of Cork in December 1920.

Fitzgerald and his colleagues studiously examined and compiled testimony, but there was clearly a British mole in the organisation since they had to repeatedly move from place to place once their hideouts were discovered.

He explained ‘we then decided to locate our staff in the School of Art, where one day [in the first half of May 1921] Crown Forces completely surrounded the building and captured all our records and equipment, but we ourselves escaped through a back way into the Opera House.’ It is likely that the captured records revealed a list of names of those who had testified.

The Italian connection to Emmet Place; fish, chips andliving in sin

Aside from these regular and occasional residents, the vicinity around Emmet Place was quite a homogenous area.

In 1911, the majority community was Catholic, but there were significant numbers of Protestants (about 6%). Most of these were working class. By 1922 there were at least four Jewish people living in the area. The population included English, Scottish, Germans and Italians.

The Italian families in Cork at this time included the Fulignatis, Bernardis, Lombardis, Bertozzis, Brunicardis, Grossis and Guisanis. Most were professionals, craftspeople or musicians. In of Emmet Place, the most relevant are the Lucchesi brothers.

Enerico (born 1877) and Gicondo (1887-1955) Lucchesi were statue makers and had been in Cork since at least 1907. By 1912, Enerico had branched out into late-night ‘fried fish and potato chips’.

In 1915 they were resident at 17, Drawbridge Street.

Giocondo married Alice Hallaway, a farmer’s daughter from Co. Dublin, that year. Enerico had claimed to be married in his 1911 census return to Alice’s sister, Hannah, but actually, they only tied the knot in 1918.

In 1921, Giocondo was working from Oliver Plunkett Street as a bookmaker, occasionally having brushes with the law, and Enerico was still running his fish and chips place. Giocondo lived in Cork for the rest of his life, but his brother appears to have left after the War of Independence.

Whilst the Crawford Art Gallery is most important to Corkonians for its priceless collection of art, it has served many other purposes and has sheltered republicans, loyalists, artists and teachers, and was a family home for most of its existence. After its redevelopment, it will no doubt become the home of new personal stories.

The research this article is based on was ed by the Government of Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’ fund.

This article appeared in the 2024 Holly Bough. See hollybough.ie.