Soldiers of the Short Grass. Dan Harvey

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      The Curragh Camp, looking west, circa turn of the twentieth century (courtesy of the National Library of Ireland).

      The River Liffey, two miles distant, provided one possible solution. Plans to raise and filter water into a large reservoir above the height of the camp from which a flow could be run into thirteen 10,000-gallon tanks were considered. However, in the end, a deep shaft was sunk to a depth of fifty-four feet in a natural hollow in the northern vicinity of the proposed camp site by Messrs A. and G. Holme, and an inexhaustible supply was sourced from the Curragh aquifer below at a rate of about 200,000 gallons a day. With the supply of water assured, detailed planning could begin.

      A precisely designed grid system was to dominate the overall layout of the camp, with a series of ten squares containing hutments for 1,000 men each in ten distinct barracks. Officers’ houses and offices were arranged according to precise measurements across the top of each barracks, with the rows of soldiers’ huts and buildings for storage across the bottom. All the buildings were to be made of American white fir timber for the sake of speed and cost, but this decision also reflected the fact that the camp was initially intended to be temporary.

      Two contracting firms were engaged: Messrs Courtney and Stephens, Blackhall Place, Dublin, to build the huts for the non-commissioned officers and men, together with the stables, and Messrs A. and G. Holme, Liverpool, to build the officers’ quarters, messes and offices. A total of around 2,000 workers were employed by the two firms. Construction began on 18 March 1855. Broken into multiple teams, each team’s daily task was the construction of a single billet hut in which they would sleep that night. The following morning, military personnel, who had been accommodated in tents, would move into the hut, and so began construction on each new day. In this manner, accommodation for 5,000 troops was completed in four months, by 9 July 1855. The local economy benefited considerably from this brisk building schedule through the provision of goods and services in addition to the boost it received from local employment within the general labour force.

      The Curragh Camp was to incorporate new features to improve the health and welfare of its occupants, prompted, no doubt, by public dissatisfaction at the time with the appalling conditions that soldiers were enduring in the Crimean War. For the first time, journalists on the ground were providing uncensored reports on these conditions. The best known of these journalists was Irishman William Howard Russell of The Times, who revealed that the hardships and suffering of the troops were due to a mixture of supply shortages, poor equipment, inadequate medical facilities and tactical folly. The impact of Russell’s reports was heightened by their immediacy, with telegraph being used to dramatically decrease reportage times. Much public criticism was quickly aroused, leading to demands for inquiries and official reports, the outcomes of which were beginning to come on stream as Lugard was in the process of laying out his camp. While remaining rudimentary, transitory and predominantly functional in nature, the camp’s design was, nonetheless, forward-looking and modern for its time. Provision was made for churches, both Catholic and Anglican, a school, post office and reading and recreation rooms, while the squares included married soldiers’ huts, washrooms, women’s privies and sanitation measures for toilets and drainage.