William Martin Murphy: Earlscliffe Owner 1945 to 1949

In 1945, Earlscliffe entered a new phase in its history when it was purchased by William Martin Murphy and his wife Norah. ¹ They arrived not as seasonal visitors or professional tenants, but as a young family making a home. With them came their daughter Jane, their son Christopher, and, soon afterwards, a second daughter, Louise. Their years at Earlscliffe were brief, lasting only from 1945 to 1949, yet they left behind a vivid family memory of the house as a place of beauty, energy and childhood freedom.

Family history

William Martin Murphy was born in Rathmines, Dublin, on 25 April 1915, the son of Christopher Joseph Murphy and Mary Josephine Markey. He was named after his grandfather, the formidable William Martin Murphy of Castletownbere, County Cork, one of the most prominent and controversial businessmen in modern Irish history.

The legacy of the grandfather's name

The elder Murphy had been chairman of the Dublin Tramway Company, owner of Clery’s and the Imperial Hotel, and controller of the Irish Independent, the Evening Herald and the Irish Catholic. To some he was an energetic moderniser and a visionary entrepreneur who modernised transport and business; to others he remained inseparable from the bitter memory of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 where he was the principal antagonist of Jim Larkin, and his contentious actions shaped Irish labour and union history. ²

Growing up with that name therefore meant inheriting both prominence and controversy. In mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the Lockout was still within living memory and it is impossible to know how consciously the younger William felt that legacy. However, it must have formed part of the social landscape in which he moved. A famous name can be both an asset and a burden.

Education and early working life

The younger William was educated at St Gerard’s College, Bray, and Ampleforth College, York, and later studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, before qualifying as a barrister. ⁴ Like his grandfather, he was connected for a time with Independent Newspapers, but his career ranged more widely than that. Over the years he worked in several roles, including as a talent scout for Rank Films, editor of the Irish Bloodstock Magazine, and later in publicity and promotion with Córas Tráchtála Teo, the Irish Export Board. ^{5 10}

He was clearly a man of varied interests and changing professional directions, part of that generation of middle- and upper-middle-class Irishmen whose lives touched law, commerce, media and public life in the decades after independence. ^{3 4}

Childhood memories

Chris's memories are wonderfully specific and are among the best evidence we have for what Earlscliffe felt like as a family home in the late 1940s.

There was an orchard, probably near where later eucalyptus plantings stood, and William himself worked among the fruit trees with a copper and brass spray pump strapped to his back “like a giant brandy flask”, pumping it up with his foot when the pressure dropped. There was also a beehive near the orchard, and Chris remembered his father smoking the hive to remove a honeycomb that was later eaten at tea.

On the eastern hillside the family grazed a red and white cow. Elsewhere in the grounds there were rabbits, chickens, dogs, a dovecote with white doves, and at one stage even an aviary. This was a more mixed and productive Earlscliffe than the tropical garden later visitors might imagine, a place where domestic life, horticulture and a little smallholding all overlapped. The post-war years, though economically constrained nationally, could still offer domestic warmth and local community. ¹⁴

This was also a period when Howth and Sutton were beginning to evolve again. Improved transport links, including the tram that stopped at Earlscliffe, made daily commuting more manageable, and suburban growth was slowly accelerating. Earlscliffe stood at the threshold between older coastal seclusion and the coming wave of mid-century suburban expansion. Even small things like owning a telephone became important to an increasing social and family life. (The Earlscliffe telephone number in 1948 was Sutton 2, which shows there weren't many in the area with such devices.) ¹⁰

William appears in these recollections as a figure of enthusiasm and presence. Chris remembered him tending the orchard and bees, while elsewhere family memories record that he grew gladioli, apparently successfully enough to win a prize at the Dublin Flower Show. He also kept two silver engraved Purdey 12-bore shotguns, and Chris remembered finding used cartridges in the stable yard after his father had been practising. There was a sense, in these memories, of activity everywhere: gardening, animals, servants, repairs, mishaps, family outings and children roaming over lawns and slopes with a degree of freedom that would now seem extraordinary.

The children’s recollections also preserve the humour and rough edges of life in the house. Chris remembered learning the hard way that nettles were not to be treated lightly, and not to be used as a toilet paper substitute! He remembers seeing a gardener kill a rat in the cabbage patch, and receiving his first boxing lesson from a gardener’s assistant, an episode that ended with the loss of his two front teeth and, later, became a family legend. He recalled his mother crashing the family Riley gently into a hedge while being pressed to keep the car on the driveway, and a handyman who fell from a ladder after claiming he had been pushed by one of the female servants. These stories are small, but together they give the overall impression of great characters and the sense of a household enjoying life. ¹⁴

Animals loom large in the Murphy memory of Earlscliffe. Louise recalled not only the celebrated bloodhound Sampson, said to have been borrowed by the Dublin police on one occasion to track an escaped prisoner in the Dublin mountains, but also the bull terriers Daisy-Belle and Rodney, who had puppies at the house, and a golden retriever called Bailey. Chris remembered Sampson from another angle, as a companion while he spent long hours on the lower lawn observing ants and grasshoppers. On one occasion the dog disappeared and was later found, unharmed, stranded on a cliff ledge below the property. Such details root the Murphy years firmly in the landscape of Earlscliffe itself: house, garden and cliff edge all bound together in memory. ¹⁴

A fuller set of family recollections and anecdotes from Chris and Louise Murphy is in Childhood Memories of Earlscliffe 1945 to 1949 at the time of William Martin Murphy

Social connections

The Murphy years also connect Earlscliffe to a wider social world. The family were good friends with Dr Robert (Bobby) Rowan Woods, the ENT surgeon whose wife, Peggy, would later buy the house. ³ Chris remembered Dr Woods removing a crayon or coloured pencil lead from his ear late at night in Dublin, and later performing his tonsil operation. Through friendships such as these, Earlscliffe remained linked to the same circle of professional and well-connected Dublin families that had shaped much of its earlier history.

List of Residents/Owners

Earlscliffe timeline