House & History

Earlscliffe Owners and Residents

Across nearly two centuries, the residents and owners of Earlscliffe placed the house within Ireland’s cultural revival, political change and professional transformation. These included two knights and an MBE recipient, markers of an earlier social order rather than defining characteristics of the house. Instead, over time, imperial distinctions gave way to achievements in medicine, scholarship, culture and science. In miniature, the house mirrors Ireland’s passage from imperial province to independent republic.

Among the earliest owners and residents were:

• Alderman Cornelius Egan, the first owner of Earlscliffe, was a Dublin corn merchant and Dublin city alderman whose commercial success and civic reform activity helped shape the early suburban development of north Dublin in the mid nineteenth century.
• Captain William Bunbury McClintock, Irish naval commander and Conservative politician who was a member of the Anglo-Irish landed elite, and whose family were the first permanent residents and owners during the period of the Great Famine i.
• The Knox family, late-Victorian civil servants whose work in church disestablishment and land reform helped administratively reshape Ireland during a period of major social and institutional change.
• John Randal Plunkett, a Dublin maltster whose family business supplied Ireland’s brewing industry, including Guinness, and linked Earlscliffe to the commercial, industrial and technological transformation of late Victorian Ireland.
• Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and a leading Irish classicist and public intellectual whose scholarship, teaching and unionist politics linked Earlscliffe to the cultural, academic and political currents of early twentieth-century Ireland. He also lived through the 1916 Easter Rising and a transformative period in Ireland.

Later owners and occupants up to the First World War, the 1916 Easter Rising and the civil war:

• The Very Rev. C. T. Ovenden Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and a senior Church of Ireland cleric and cultural figure whose brief ownership of Earlscliffe reflects the Anglican Church’s search for continuity in the early years of the Irish Free State.
• Robert Rooney, a civil servant turned Irish nationalist whose career, arrest, imprisonment and later reinstatement in the Land Commission reflect Ireland’s transition from British rule to the Irish Free State.
• Dr Ella Webb MBE, a pioneering Irish paediatrician and founder of the Children's Sunshine Home. She was a public health reformer whose medical, humanitarian and women-led achievements linked Earlscliffe to early twentieth-century advances in healthcare and social medicine.
• Sir John Lumsden, Chief Medical Officer of Guinness Brewery, founder of the St John Ambulance Brigade of Ireland and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. He was a physician and humanitarian whose founding of the St John Ambulance Brigade and leadership in public health helped shape Ireland’s emergency medical and welfare services in the early twentieth century. He also built and enhanced the garden.

Owners and occupants after the Second World War include:

• William Martin Murphy, a mid-twentieth-century businessman, who was an Orchardist and grew Gladioli for show. William was named after his grandfather, who had been a powerful businessman, newspaper proprietor and tramway magnate most famously associated with the Dublin Lockout of 1913.
• Lily Margaret Graham Gough, a Slade-trained artist with close ties to the Irish Literary Revival whose brief, non-residential ownership of Earlscliffe reflects the house’s momentary connection to wider artistic and cultural networks in post-war Ireland.
• Olive & Brigadier Arthur Christopher Lancelot ("Kit") Stanley-Clarke, a distinguished British Army officer and his wife who briefly owned the property but couldn't afford to live there.
• Margaret (Peggy) Rosita Woods & Dr Robert Rowan Woods. Robert was an ear, nose and throat specialist. Peggy was the one who made significant alterations to the house.
• Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowles, a Colonel in the British Army who served in both World Wars and made some radical changes to the Garden.
• Dr David Robinson, an Irish horticultural scientist who transformed the grounds through his horticultural vision. He established gardens of international reputation, now continued and extended by his daughter, Karen Foley. She embeds a strong ecological and environmental ethos that speaks to contemporary concerns about landscape, biodiversity and stewardship.

The following pages explore the development of the house, the succession of its residents and the evolution of its gardens. Together they show how one coastal home, overlooking Doldrum and Dublin Bay, has continually adapted to the shifting social, cultural and environmental landscapes of Howth, Dublin, Ireland, and the rest of the world.