Jacob’s signage, Bishop Street.
Today, the Dublin Institute of Technology (Aungier Street) and the National Archives of Ireland dominate Bishop Street, but the Dublin street was once home to Jacob’s, one of the largest employers of female workers in the city for generations.
On 20 May 1987, Dubliners woke up to the news that the former biscuit factory site had been “badly damaged in a spectacular fire.” Twelve units of the Dublin Fire Brigade battled the blaze, and the Irish Press reported that “a thick pall of smokes hung over streets as far away as half a mile.”
By 1987, there were no more biscuits being made on Bishop Street. Like Cadbury’s across the Liffey, Jacob’s had long left the city for suburbia. As historian David Dickson has noted, there was something of an “industrial flight to the suburbs” at the time. Having merged with Boland’s Biscuits, Tallaght became home to Jacob’s from the 1970s, and the building on Bishop Street had sat empty for some time before the flames ravaged it.
Passing Bishop Street, you could miss the ‘W.R Jacob & Co. Limited’ branded brickwork, which has been nicely incorporated into the DIT campus building, even receiving a nice lick of gold paint before the 1916 centenary. A tower of the original factory remains too, now incorporated into the National Archives of Ireland building. These are interesting reminders in the modern urban landscape of what was once an economic powerhouse, and one of the few industries open to women in significant numbers.
1960s image of Jacob’s factory from commemorative 1916 booklet. The tower remains today. (Image Credit: Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive)
Dublin in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries suffered greatly from a lack of skilled employment in a broad sense. As Joseph V. O’Brien noted in his classic study Dear Dirty Dublin: A City in Distress:
A remarkable feature of labour in Dublin was the predominance of the class of ‘general labourers’. They numbered over 14,000 in 1901, between one-quarter and one-third of the male industrial work force, a proportion suggesting that this class of worker arose, not as in England or Scotland from the needs of the established trade, but out of the general lack of varied and widespread industrial employment.
While things were bad for male workers, there were little options for women too. A staggering percentage of female workers are listed as ‘domestic servants’ in 1901 and 1911 census returns, with “over 14,000 of them in 1901 representing about 40 percent of all female workers in domestic and industrial employment.”
Unlike in Belfast, where the linen industry was a significant employer of female labour, the textile and clothing industries in Dublin were nowhere near as significant. As Rosemary Cullen Owens notes in her social history of women in Irish society, “outside the textile and clothing industries” it was Jacob’s that emerged as the largest employer of women in the capital.
Jacob’s on Bishop Street emerged from the W & R Jacob company in Waterford, who operated a small biscuit factory on Bridge Street from the early 1850s. To the good fortune of Dublin (if not Waterford) the company established their headquarters at Bishop Street and Peter’s Row in Dublin, providing work to thousands.
Earlier twentieth century image of Jacob’s, from the collection of the National Library of Ireland.
Conditions in Jacob’s have been remembered as difficult, though it should be acknowledged that in some ways they were ahead of many employers. As Patricia McCaffrey has noted in a brilliant breakdown analysis of female labour in Jacob’s:
The Jacob’s were Quakers and their welfare provisions were advanced for their time. A doctor and a dentist were in attendance at the factory, and workers had very good canteen and recreational facilities.
Jacob’s approach to their workforce was in some ways paternalistic, not unlike that of Guinness, but like Guinness there was something of a hostility to organised labour within the factory. From 1911, the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union (IWWU) had a strong presence within Jacob’s, to the annoyance of its management. Tensions included the dismissal of workers who wore the ‘red hand badge’ of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) during the 1913 Lockout, no doubt linked to the bitterness of a 1911 dispute within the factory. On 1 September 1913, there were 2,085 women employed by Jacob’s, and some of these women would become central to the citywide dispute.
One of the IWWU members caught up in the Lockout was Rosie Hackett, later a participant in the 1916 Rising with the Irish Citizen Army. Due to her union activities, Hackett was dismissed from Jacob’s in the aftermath of the Lockout. The Larkinte Irish Worker newspaper went to war with Jacob’s, printing the names of female ‘scab’ labourers. As Padráig Yeates has detailed in his definitive history of the Lockout, the Jacob’s women were among the most radical in the city during the dispute, as they “took to holding marches along the tramway routes, seriously disrupting services”.
Former Jacob’s worker Rosie Hackett, alongside other veterans of the labour movement, including Frank Robbins, Mick Kelly and Cathal O’Shannon.
During the 1916 Rising, there was particular scorn for the rebel forces in this district of the city. It is historically inaccurate to argue that there was outright hostility to the Rising in general in the city; as Barton and Foy have detailed of the civilian population around Boland’s, “the local population was friendly and sympathetic, giving Volunteers an oration in Grand Canal Street and Hogan Place, where women unsuccessfully begged them to take refuge in houses and men offered to hide their weapons.” There was no such sympathy displayed in the area around Jacob’s, where one Volunteer recalled the women to be akin to “French Revolution furies”.
On entering the building on Easter Monday, the Volunteers encountered the staff of the factory who were small in number owing to it being a bank holiday. These included a watchman, Henry Fitzgerald, and the caretaker, Thomas Orr. Orr attempted to call the chairman of the company, George Jacob. The rebels succeeded in preventing this by cutting the telephone and telegraph wires. Thomas MacDonagh allowed the staff to leave the premises, though Thomas Orr and Henry Fitzgerald refused to go, believing it their job to stay at the factory.
Occupying a biscuit factory brought obvious advantages for the men in the garrison, and one Volunteer recalled that biscuit tins could be useful in a revolutionary situation:
I had a great time eating plenty of cocoa chocolate and biscuits galore. The next thing I remember was that we threw a lot of empty tins out through the windows which were spread out over the roadway, so that if any of the enemy came along in the dead of night, he would hit the tins and we would know that there was somebody on the move.
Hostile mobs and individuals remained a problem for the garrison, particularly on the first day and night of the occupation. This was an unsurprising feature of the occupation of Jacob’s, given that almost 400 Jacob’s employees alone had enlisted in the British Army during the First World War. Yet beyond the ‘Seperation Women’ who were dependent on their husbands fighting in the trenches of Europe, no doubt the seizure of a building that was of such economic importance to the women of the district contributed to the hostility.
In the decades following independence, the factory remained hugely important to young women in particular. Kevin C. Kearns interviewed Jacob’s employees for his important oral history collection Dublin’s Lost Heroines – Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City, one jokingly remembered the banter and humour of working the floor:
The factory was a great place for getting sex information, from older girls and women. Mostly it was conveyed through jokes, smutty talk and hair-raising stories. Before that, we were too innocent to know anything!
When Jacob’s left the inner-city in the 1970s, it left a large derelict site behind it, most of which was gutted by the flames of 1987. In a city awash with such derelict buildings, there was perhaps an inevitability to the fire, as others had gone the same way. Still, amidst the buildings which have replaced it, it is nice that there are reminders of what was once the beating hard of a community, and a centre of female employment in a city that offered women little.
