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‘Savage Manners and Inhuman Barbarity’: Bull-Baiting at Ballybricken, 1714–1826

Bull-baiting, prize-fighting, and the cockpit were ‘pleasures’ then much patronised by the bucks as well as the lower orders of society. The great prevalence of bull-baiting in Ireland has been ascribed to the old-time close connection of the country with Spain, and the consequent adoption of many Spanish usages and sports, as also to the fact that the Midland counties formed one great bullock walk entirely given up to the grazing of cattle to be deported from Cork, Waterford or Dublin.

Ballybricken, outside Waterford, was a favourite resort for bullbaiters, and was surrounded by houses from which spectators looked on as at a Spanish bull-fight. The centre for bull-baiting in Dublin was in the Corn Market. But these brutal exhibitions very often gave rise to much riot and bloodshed, and in 1798 were prohibited by law, and the ‘sport’ discontinued.

Nora Tynan O’Mahony, Freeman’s Journal, Thursday, 6 February 1913

The custom of bull-baiting in Waterford, staged at Ballybricken, where the Bull Post serves as one of the area’s most recognisable landmarks, saw the old Waterford Corporation ‘Ordered that a bull rope be provided at charge of the city revenue’ in October 1714, at the start of the slaughtering season. In the preceding centuries, Spanish merchants trading wine and fruit regularly traversed the Suir estuary. So extensive was their business that many of these families settled in the port city. Over time, they introduced their customs and pastimes to Ireland’s oldest city. Ballybricken came to be recognised as the perfect arena for bull-baiting, one twentieth-century commentator noting that it was ‘then an open space outside the city walls, but now surrounded by well-built residential and business houses, and also the venue of an important monthly cattle fair’.

Ballybricken Gaol.

In addition to the rope provided by the city for bull-baiting, dogs were required and easily procured. These canines were specially trained by locals, with one contemporary account detailing how ‘to enhance and render perfect the sport, a peculiar breed of dogs was cherished, the purity of whose blood was marked by small stature, with enormous disproportionate heads and jaws, the upper short and snub, and the under projecting beyond it’. It appears that the two breeds popular for bull-baiting were the bulldog and the Staffordshire bull terrier.

The custom then, come slaughtering season, was that every bull intended for butchery in the city could be commandeered by the crowd and baited before being killed. The historian Jack O’Neill suggests that the ‘justification for the barbarism of bull baiting, it was claimed that the baiting caused the heart to pump the blood at a faster than normal rate and this, it was contended, tenderized the meat’. The days surrounding baiting were big business, as people bet on dogs in the action, drank, etc.

Another right claimed by bull-baiters was that upon the election of a mayor, the civic official had to supply a brand new rope. This rope was given to the ‘Grand Council of the Bull Ring’ and placed in the city jail, where it was kept by the head gaoler until needed. This ‘Grand Council’ was selected by the citizens, and the leader known as the ‘Mayor of the Ring’ was appointed by the High Constable of Waterford city. The position was one of the most envied in the area, surpassing the role of the Corporation’s official ‘butter taster’ or ‘nightwatchman’. The latter in the nineteenth century was given a grappling hook to aid their effort in helping individuals from the river.

One newly elected mayor refused to supply the rope, leading to a bull being driven into his hallway, while a mob prepared to ransack and loot his residence. The mayor quickly granted the rope before his house was destroyed. ‘Rambler’ wryly remarked in the Cork Examiner that, ‘One has often heard of a bull in a china shop, but never of a bull in a Mayoral chamber.’ Another mayor refused to grant a rope, leading to authorities quelling a riot in Waterford. The ‘Mayor of the Ring’ had to arrange bull-baits on two feast days each year: Michaelmas and New Year’s Day. These were great civic occasions with much pageantry, as the Lord Mayor and Waterford Council walked to the hill through St Patrick’s Gate in their robes, while the first citizen carried a staff with a copper bull figure on top.

Otherwise, Jack O’Neill suggests that the season for bull-baiting lasted from October to 1 April. On the occasions of the mayor’s attendance, up to ten animals could be baited in one day. Another custom on the day when the council attended was for newly wed brides to kiss the mayor as another of his duties was to guard bachelors and approve of their subsequent choice of partner. At the conclusion of the bait, the grooms were expected to entertain the mayor and council.

The exercise of bull-baiting saw a bull tied to a rope, about 2in in diameter with a leather collar and buckle, with the rope being passed through a ring in the ground. Once the bull was secured, the dogs were let loose, and the poor animal was baited until it was exhausted. Of the dogs, John P. Pender wrote (in 1929):

The savage ferocity and tenacity of these small animals was quite extraordinary. We are told that a single one, unsupported, would seize a fierce bull by the lip or nose, and pin to the ground the comparatively gigantic animal as if he had been fixed with a stake of iron. Even after the fracture of their limbs, the dogs never relaxed their hold, and it was often necessary at the conclusion of a day’s sport to cut off broken legs, and even in that mutilated state they were seen on three legs, running at the bull.

The citizens of Waterford formed a circle around the scene, while other spectators viewed from windows in nearby houses. Certainly in the seventeenth century, many of these dwellings had been built by Cromwellian settlers, transforming Ballybricken into a new suburb of the city. In the centre of the green, where the bull was tied, was a pole bearing a large copper bull on its top. This was removed near the end of the eighteenth century, replaced by a concrete structure mounted by a lamp. Referred to as the Bull Post, it would witness the speeches of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond in the subsequent centuries. The steps of the Bull Post were to aid dogs in their attack on the animal. However, it appeared that this edifice was on the verge of being removed in 1929, with Pender noting that, ‘Now this again is threatened to be replaced by a ferro-concrete tower in connection with the Shannon Scheme. Progress!’

Fifty years later, Waterford Corporation approved the erection of a concrete statue of a bull to be placed on Ballybricken Hill, to symbolise the city’s association with the cattle trade in the nineteenth century, and as a traditional site of bull-baiting when the hill was considered ‘the Irishtown of Waterford’. It was hoped that the statue would be similar to monuments in Munich. This monument never came to pass. In December 1988, Jack O’Neill said of the Bull Post, ‘Nowadays, it’s a place where people gather to sit and chat in the summer sun, where old men speak of the days of the fairs and of days when this city was not an unemployment black spot. You can be at peace on Ballybricken Hill.’

An Act of George III in 1779 forbade the practice of bull-baiting, but was rarely enforced. After the 1798 Rebellion, the ‘sport’ was prohibited, although it continued to be staged in Waterford for another five years. However, the Waterford Mirror on 28 September 1808 reported:

The shameful practice of Bull-baiting has commenced in the city and neighbourhood, with all its usual symptoms of savage manners and inhuman barbarity. It may be useless to tell those who indulge themselves in this horrid amusement that it is utterly at variance with moral feelings and with the sacred obligations of religion.

In the pursuit of this immoral, irreligious and criminal sport, they violate the laws of society, and subject themselves to the full penalties of their transgressions. They trespass upon the property of their neighbours, and put the lives of their fellow citizens in the most hazardous jeopardy. Let them not imagine that they can do this with impunity.

We have only to add, that the Mayor and Recorder, with their unusual attention to the interests and peace of the city have resolved to punish every offender with the utmost severity, in order to secure the total suppression of a practice so injurious to morals, and so hostile to civilisation.

Irish politician and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party John Redmond, c.1909. Michael Laffan noted of the Waterford City MP’s legacy that, ‘Nonetheless he was a worthy and noble representative of the Irish political tradition, he proved that patience, negotiation and compromise could bring about important reforms, he helped to embed parliamentary procedures in the habits and instincts of Irish nationalists, and he played a significant role in transforming Ireland in the decades before the First World War. The miscalculations and failures of his later years have obscured his many achievements.’

The effort to end the pastime was enhanced by a celebrated Quaker missionary visiting the city the same year. They formed a deputation to visit the Protestant bishop at...