75

William Dargan

1799–1867

 

On the lawn outside the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin there stands a slightly larger-than-life statue.  On the plinth is carved a single word: Dargan.  This is a memorial not only to the originator of the National Gallery itself, but also to the creator of the first railway in Ireland.  Dargan (like Bianconi earlier) transformed the nature of life in Ireland for every one, both economically and culturally.

      William Dargan was born in County Carlow on 18th February 1799, the year after the great rebellion, which had deeply shocked the whole island.  His father was a farmer, but William was sent out of Ireland to be educated in England.  He began his working life with an apprenticeship in a surveyor's office.

      One of the first important jobs in which he was involved was aiding Thomas Telford, the great civil engineer, in laying the new road to Holyhead, the little port in north Wales from which the Irish ferries were to depart.  When this was completed Dargan came back to Ireland and worked on several other developments.  But the advent of the railways gave him his first real opening as a businessman.

      He found backers for his own scheme, a railway to run from Dublin to Kingstown, as it was then called, where the boats from Britain docked.  The construction was authorized in 1831 by Parliament.  The first train ran out of Dublin on 17th December 1834, and caused great excitement.

      Dargan now turned north to develop the Ulster railway, which opened on 12th August 1839.  This was planned to link up with the Ulster Canal (also his work) so that a new transport route was available across the province.  He created the line to Carrickfergus and Ballymena, and a line along the coast to Bangor.

      This was the heyday of the railway boom.  Tracks were being laid down everywhere, and Dargan was one of the main contractors for the jobs.  He grew wealthy, but railways were not the last of his innovations.

      Inspired by the great exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which the Prince Consort had promoted in London in 1851, he suggested that Dublin should also have a great exhibition.  A committee was gathered, and he agreed to underwrite the scheme.  A part of this exhibition was to be a display of fine art drawn from collections all over the British Isles, and from several European nations.

      This exhibition opened on what was then called the Duke's Lawn, the open area on Merrion Square behind the Duke of Leinster's townhouse.  The exhibition premises were huge, and it proved to be very popular when it was opened in May, 1853.  It was visited in August by Queen Victoria, who was much amused by what she saw.  However, Dargan lost money on it.  By now he was living in a large country house, Mount Anville, just outside Dublin, where Queen Victoria visited him and his family.  Dargan, however, refused the title she offered him.

      The pictures gathered for the exhibition inspired the idea of a National Gallery, which opened after many vicissitudes in 1864.  Though Dargan had inspired the idea, many other people were involved, including civil servants of the treasury.  As a result, the negotiations over the scheme, the planning and erection of a building to stand on the exhibition side, and the gathering of pictures for a collection, became a complicated sage in its own right.  Dargan's portrait was painted by the gallery's first director, George Mulvany.  A plaque on the east wall of the gallery recalls that it was erected 'by the contributions of the fellow-countrymen of William Dargan, Esquire, aided by the Imperial government in commemoration of his munificent liberality founding and sustaining the Dublin Industrial Exhibition of 1853'.  The last touch put to the building before it opened, in December 1863, was the hoisting into place of Farrell's statue of Dargan, more than a decade after his exhibition had opened.

      In the meantime, Dargan had been involved in many other schemes, one of which was a flax mill in Chapelizod on the Liffey.  However, not all of these ventures were successful.  In 1854 he opened the New Line to Bray and Wicklow, which was to lead to the development of Bray as a resort and even a commuter town.  By now he was chairman of the Dublin-Kingstown Railway, which, as the initiator of the railway age, had an important effect on Ireland's history.  Though it brought about many economic improvements, the railway also hastened the departure of emigrants to England and beyond.

      Dargan had always tried to keep the reins of his businesses in his own hands.  In 1866 he suffered a riding accident and was laid up, and matters began to go awry.  As a writer of the time remarked: 'His affairs became disordered and his health and spirit were undermined.'  Mount Anville had to be sold to an order of nuns who used it as an exclusive girls' school.  He died in his town house on 2nd February 1867.

      Dargan had played a part in many things: bringing the railways to rural and seacoast areas, promoting the development of resorts such as Bray, and the development of large-scale industries.  It was all very much in the nineteenth-century style of the pioneering man of business.

      Yet it may well be that the National Gallery was among his most important inspirations.  Generations of Dubliners have certainly thanked him for it.  It was a haven of peace and enlightenment for GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [49] when he was a young man in the 1870s, when the gallery was almost the only beacon of culture and civilization in the city of Dublin.