Brown’s Yard 3

As you enter Brown’s Yard from High Street the first cottage of the row of four is the home of a man called Mr M Teggart. I don’t have a lot of information on this man except that he had the ability …

… to set a photograph into a frame, and I must say that he made an exceptionally good job of it. Mr Teggart had a relation, a nephew, who was in the photographic business and it was this young man who took the photograph of the young girl in communion dress standing at her door in Brown’s Yard.

At this time (1929) the next two houses in the row were occupied by two sisters, the first of the two sisters was called Catharine. Catharine lived in number two and she was married to a Dundalk man, he was called Thomas McDermott.  Thomas was a war veteran, and suffered from the effects of the mustard gas that assailed him in the course of the Great War. The McDermott’s had no family of their own, but they housed and reared two of Mrs McDermott’s sister’s children from next door.  This was a practice not at all uncommon in those days. The little girl in the photograph is one of those two children.

One interesting thing to be said about this particular cottage, number two, is that before the McDermott’s lived there, the cottage was let out to a man who sadly committed suicide by hanging himself from a rafter on the stairwell. After this sad occurrence the cottage was reputed to have been haunted.  Because of this haunted house rumour the landlord, who was called Mr. McKenna, was having a difficult time finding another tenant to take up the tenancy of this reputedly haunted building. Mr and Mrs McDermott needed to find accommodation so they accepted the tenancy of Number 2 Brown’s Yard.

 

………. more later ……..