Pontana Fete 1936

Monsignor Segrave

In June 1936 a group of civically-minded citizens organised a week long Fete in order to raise money for a new organ for St. Peter's Church. It was in honour of the deceased Monsignor Patrick Segrave, Archdeacon of Armagh (1849 - 1934) who had worked tirelessly to upgrade St. Peter's Church but never saw the installation of "a organ worth of the Catholic town of Drogheda". Monsignor Segrave oversaw the completion and decoration of St. Peters, "universally admitted to be one of the finest parish churches in the country" and was there for its two greatest achievements; the consecration of the church in 1914 & the enshrinement of the relic of St. Oliver Plunkett in 1921.

The Pontana (the Latin form of the Irish name for Drogheda) Fete was set in The O'Raghaillaighs GAA grounds and had a a very wide range of events with something indeed for everyone. The main programme of activites was distinct from the five stalls set up around the stadium, each of which provided their own entertainment. The variety on offer is a testament to the organizers of the festival and would attract crowds of people today.

Sport featured heavily, with Gaelic Senior & Minor football tournaments for local and school teams, veteran hurlers and 'old timers' football matches, a Louth vs. Meath camogie match, road races from outlying parishes (Slane, Duleek, Termonfeckin) finishing at the grounds, a tennis tournament open to all, and a gymnastics display by the Free State Army team. There were tug-o-war competitions, fireworks displays, drill displays by the C.B.S. & St. Philomenas schools. The Drogheda Brass and Reed Band and the Artane Brass Band played open air concerts for children and adults alike. Flower shows and Irish dancing competitions took place alongside an industrial fair, the fete showcasing all of Drogheda community life.

The individual stalls, all with religious names and individual colours such as St. Vincents (blue & gold), Immaculata stall (pink & white), and Blessed Oliver's Stall (red & purple), ran their own lineups of fun and games. Some went all out with chutes and helter-skelters, obstacle golf, clay-pigeon shooting competitions, treasure hunts both on foot, in cars & on bicycles, ceilidhes, fancy-dress parades, and five a side football matches. The old fairground favourites of hoop-la, shooting galleries, fortune telling, donkey rides, wheel of fortune were present along with games of chance like 'penny on the squares', three card trick, and dice games.

There were numerous refreshments available for the punters at the stalls such as teas, minerals, dips, ice cream, cigarettes and even an ice salon.

Some of the amusements listed have fallen out of common use in Ireland, such as 'Aunt Sally', 'Nail in the Block' and 'Bagatelle'. Aunt Sally is an English pub game, which is still played in Oxfordshire, England where it originated. It consisted of a wooden ball, called a dolly - originally a figurine manikin painted to look like 'Aunt Sally' balanced on an iron spike. The aim was to knock Sally off her perch without hitting the iron.

The required items for playing Aunt Sally

Bagatelle was effectively an early version of a pinball machine, whilst Nail in the Block is fairly self-descriptive - players take turns driving a nail into a block of wood with the wedge end of a hammer.

A game board for bagatelle

Prizes were handed out on the evening of the 29th June with the Drogheda and Artane Bands bringing to a close what must have been a wonderful 12 days of festivities.

The fairground

5 Gruesome Drogheda Events

Drogheda has had it's fair share of gruesome and bloody happenings over the centuries so here's a quick look over some of it's more noticeable incidents:

(Just a reminder this list is subjective so if you disagree with some of the entries please add your own in the comments!)  

1.  The Tholsel, West St.

Whilst the Tholsel is historically known as housing the Corporation Chambers, the Assizes, and the County Courts for one hundred and twenty years, and being the focal point for public meetings and public auctions, it has also witnessed it's fair share of public executions.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the public gallows was erected at the bottom of Peter Street opposite the Tholsel and was in use up to c.1800. Many local United Irishmen were hung there in retaliation for the 1798 rebellion. One famous case was the execution of a highwayman, James Flinn, one of a gang led by the famous Collier the Robber. Flinn was captured during a highway robbery near Deepforde Bridge (now near the current entrance to Stameen housing estate on the Dublin Road). He was tried, found guilty and hung at the Tholsel in 1795. Unluckily for Flinn it was his first time "on the road" proving that crime does indeed not pay.


2. Cadaver Stones

St. Peter's Tombstone

Beaulieu House Cadaver Stone

These gruesome tombstones can be found in Stamullen, at Beaulieu House and the most well-known, in St.Peter's Church of Ireland churchyard, Peter St. Unlike the normal carved tombstone, in the case of these cadaver (from the Latin word for corpse) stones the body is presented in a decomposed state, generally wrapped in a funerary shroud. During the 14th and 15th century when these stones were constructed, a series of plagues swept across Ireland from the continent, and people became obsessed with death and the transience of life.

The stone at Beaulieu House is perhaps the most well preserved of the three in the area, and admittedly the most grotesque. Snakes and worms hang out of the ears & twine around ribs and legs. Toads cling onto the chest and a creature with bat-like wings hangs on to the right leg, while all sorts of maggots, horned lizards and toads with pointed snouts nestle in the folds of the shroud. Nothing about your own mortality is left to the imagination.





3. Gallows Lane

"Off with his head!" - Henry VIII

Tudor Drogheda was the site of many Irish Parliaments, an indication of it's status, and was also not free from the political machinations to be found across the water in England. In 1467 two of the most powerful men in Ireland at the time, Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, & his brother-in-law, Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th Earl of Kildare, were accused by their political enemies of of being in league with the Gaelic Irish against King Henry VIII. The charges of treason and extortion meant their lands, titles, and finances were confiscated. 

They were both summoned to answer the charges at the Parliament in Drogheda, which the Earl of Desmond duly did. As soon as he did he was taken to Gallows Lane (stretching from Hardman's Gardens to the Windmill Road) and beheaded. John D'Alton, in his 1844 History of Drogheda sets the scene: "Under these charges the Earl was found guilty, and beheaded on the 15th Febuary, 1467; the melancholy scene took place, according to tradition, on the north commons of Drogheda, where the old gallows was formerly erected...His head was sent to Dublin to be spiked on the wall of the castle, and his body was interred in the Dominican Friary..." 

His brother-in-law the Earl of Kildare managed to dodge this trial where he probably would have received the same fate, and escaped to England where he pleaded his case before the King and was pardoned. 


4. The Head of St. Oliver Plunkett

St. Peter's Church on West St. holds the shrine of St. Oliver Plunkett, who was martyred at Tyburn, England in 1681, the last Roman Catholic martyr to die in England. 

St. Oliver Plunkett

Plunkett was Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland at the time of his death, and was recognized as the last victim of "The Popish Plot", a conspiracy theory which imagined an extensive Roman Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II. Oliver Plunkett was highly regarded in his office as Archbishop and was praised for his reforms of the damaged Roman Catholic Church after the ravages of Cromwell. His message was one of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness, a ideology he stood by until his death. He established a Jesuit College in Drogheda in 1670; over a year later of the 150 students, 40 were Protestant, making this college the first integrated school in Ireland.

Due to the large Anti-Roman Catholic feeling prevalent at the time and the hysteria of "The Popish Plot", Plunkett (being a prominent figure in the Church) was accused of treason. He was tried twice, once in Ireland where it was deemed he would get off scott free, and so again in London. The second trial is generally regarded as a serious miscarriage of justice, and despite pleas for mercy for Plunkett and many people convinced of his innocence he was found guilty and condemned to be hung, drawn and quartered, the punishment for treason.

After his execution his head was thrown onto the prepared fire nearby but was rescued by his friends. The Relic of the Head was brought to Rome and other places before ending up in the care of the Dominican Nuns in the Siena Convent, Drogheda c.1725. The Relic was transferred to St. Peter's Church, West St. in 1921 where it has remained since. 

For some people the Relic is an important Roman Catholic artifact to be venerated, for others it's a source of morbid curiosity; it is, after all, a preserved human head in a glass box that people come and look at. However, the ideals and beliefs of St. Oliver Plunkett, of peace, tolerance and forgiveness, should serve as examples to people of all faith.     


5. St. Peter's Church, Peter St.

The attack on Drogheda

Cromwell's siege of Drogheda in 1649 is well documented and was effectively an act of war against the Royalists based in Ireland. Cromwell's Parliamentarians wanted to finish the job of quashing the Royalists and more ominously, to get revenge for the persecution of Ulster Protestants. Like all wars, atrocities were committed, towards soldiers and citizens alike, sanctioned or not by the Parliamentarian high command. 


Reports of what actually happened in the town during the attack are difficult to confirm as both sides may have exaggerated in their reports of the siege. There were, by Cromwell's own account 3,500 dead afterwards; of whom 2,800 were soldiers which leaves an estimate of 7-800 civilian casualties. However there are a number of well documented incidents, by outside observers and Cromwell himself, that illustrate the bloodiness of the battle. 

Drogheda's garrison was led by Sir Arthur Aston, who due to a riding accident years previously had lost part of a leg and had a wooden one fitted. After the Parliamentarians breached the town walls, Aston and his remaining garrison fled up to Millmount where they were finally captured by Cromwell's soldiers. Any Royalist soldiers found in the town, including the men in Millmount, were put to the sword as Aston had refused to surrender to Cromwell and so gave up his chance to spare his own, and his men's, lives. Aston himself was dealt the grisly fate of being beaten to death with his own wooden leg, as Cromwell's soldiers heard a rumour it contained gold, and then was hacked to pieces. 

As the Parliamentarian soldiers made their way through the town, it was reported variously that either over one hundred Royalist soldiers, or soldiers and citizens, fled to the Catholic St. Peter's Church on Peter St. (it's foundations were built over by the current St. Peters C.o.I.). The people inside were ordered to surrender and they would be spared but they refused, whereupon, Cromwell wrote later "I ordered the steeple of St. Peters' Church to be fired, when one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames 'God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn." When the remaining 200 soldiers finally surrendered again Cromwell says "their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped to Barbadoes."

Whilst Cromwell gave no direct orders for the massacre of civilians, the same cannot be said for the Catholic clergy in the town. This was also a religious war as much as a political one, and orders were given that any Catholic priest or friar should be, to use Cromwell's phrase, "knocked on the head promiscuously". Tom Reilly's book "Cromwell at Drogheda" mentions an account by a Jesuit priest in Drogheda during the siege. In it he states that churches were pillaged and destroyed and townspeople massacred. He also mentions that when the Parliamentarian soldiers discovered two priests in hiding "they led them off in triumph, and accompanied by the tumultuous crowd, conducted them to the market-place...they tied both to stakes in the ground and pierced their bodies with shots till they expired". Another elderly priest was dragged from his bed by the soldiers and savagely beaten, dying from his injuries a few days later.  

What happened at Drogheda was by all accounts a savage affair but it was meant to be a deterrent, to discourage future resistance from other towns. Indeed the neighbouring garrisons of Trim and Dundalk either surrendered or fled when they heard what fate had befallen Drogheda. The whole siege had a huge impact on British & Irish history as a whole as well as being an extremely gruesome part of the town's history.