The docklands area throws up some of the most interesting street names in Dublin, including Misery Hill, which we’ve looked at before on the site. Another curious name is ‘Blood Stoney Road’, located just beside Grand Canal Dock.
While the name sounds quite gruesome and may lead you to suspect a connection in the area to something morbid historically, this street is actually named after a man. Bindon Blood Stoney (1829-1909) was a groundbreaking Irish engineer, responsible for designing the modern quay walls of the River Liffey, as well as designing the O’Connell Bridge (then known as the Carlisle Bridge), Grattan Bridge and Butt Bridge. These, in truth, are only a small sample of his achievements. Only a stones throw from the street named in his honour is a monument to his ingenuity, in the form of the recently restored diving bell.
An Offaly man by birth, Bloody Stoney served as Chief Engineer to the Dublin Port and Docks Board from 1852 until 1898. Turtle Bunburry, author of a history of the Dublin docklands, has noted that ” Bindon was the first Irish engineer to understand the immense possibilities of using concrete as a structural material”, and that this had led one scholar to brand him “the father of Irish concrete.”
The diving bell that Blood Stoney designed in the 1860s remained in use for almost a century. With its lower section hollow and bottomless, six men could work within the structure when it was lowered into the Liffey, entering through an access tunnel from the surface. Mary Mulvihill, who included the diving bell in her study of ingenious Irish inventions and theories, noted that working inside the diving bell was not exactly pleasant:
Compressed air was fed in from an adjacent barge but, even though the air was cooled, the temperature inside quickly became unbearably hot, and shifts lasted only 30 minutes. The bell was crucial to Stoney’s innovative way of building dock walls: the men inside the bell worked on the riverbed exposed at their feet, excavating the site where a massive concrete block would later go.
In 1948, The Irish Times interviewed a number of the men who were still working within Blood Stoney’s diving bell. By then things had improved a little, and the men were able to “communicate with the surface by telephone.” One of the workers, Frank Mullen, said “it is hard work. You want a good pair of lungs and a good pair of ears. Sometimes, if you have a cold, it seems as if someone is hammering a chisel into them.” Not a job to envy.
Bindon Blood Stoney died in Dublin on 5 May 1909, and he was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery. The fact that the diving bell remains in Dublin today is a fitting memorial to one of the great innovators of Dublin’s history.