Time-Twisting, Mind-Warping Greystones Trivia #4

Read it. Weep.

ur resident town historian Gary Acheson takes another break from his mighty Blasts From The Past to bring you another smogasbord of Top Greystones Trivia.

So, sit back, relapse, and enjoy…

Did you know..

Jack Butler Yeats

That the house in Redford called Cartref (home to painter Jack Yeats for several years) is named after the Welsh word for ‘home’?

That a 1909 agreement with Rathdown District Council to install electric street lighting in Greystones was scuppered by Wicklow County Council insisting that the Greystones Electric Company post a £500 bond before digging any holes in the roads?

That the agreement was finally secured in 1910 and the installation of public lighting began?

That the first Catholic church in Greystones Town was a pre-fabricated corrugated iron structure built in 1895 on the site of the present church and that was destroyed in a gale in 1903?

That in 1890, Charles Stewart Parnell made a statement in the House of Commons concerning, what else, the state of Greystones Harbour?

That, in fact, from the early nineteenth century right up to 1922 the only non-Harbour related mention of the town in the House of Commons was a request that the first train of the day leave Greystones 5 minutes earlier?

That Malvern House in Delgany was, in the nineteenth century, a ‘hydropathic establishment’ run by Dr. Alfred Johnson, son of Dr. Edward Johnson, who ran a similar operation in Malvern in England – hence the name?

That in 1903 a pedestrian footbridge was placed at the north end of Greystones Station, replacing an unguarded level crossing?

That the late lamented Gap Bridge on the North Beach carried the second alignment of the railway before it was moved back to its third and current alignment?

The the first bridge – known as Ennis’ Bridge – lay outside the Gap Bridge by about 10 metres and was blown up by the Army in the 1940s as a hazard?

Get more Greystones trivia kicks right here.