Born: 23 June 1851, Ireland
Died: 3 July 1916
Country most active: United Kingdom, Ireland
Also known as: Gertrude Frances Hayes, Gertrude Frances Talbot Power
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Eoin Kinsella. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Dunning, Gertrude Frances (née Hayes; other married name Talbot Power) (1856–1926), philanthropist, was born on 29 March 1856 in St Patrick’s parish in Cork city, the only child of Thomas Hayes (1820/21–12 Aug. 1905) and his wife Margaret (née Ryan) of Grenville House, Cork. Margaret died within a month of giving birth, aged just eighteen. A prosperous merchant, Thomas was a director of the Cork drapers T. Lyons and Co., Ltd, and was heavily involved with local charities, including the Society of St Vincent de Paul. On his death in 1905 he bequeathed his daughter an estate worth £52,875. The conditions of his will were unusual enough to attract notice in the Irish Times, which gently mocked the ‘quaint’ stipulation that Gertrude be paid £199 19s. each day beginning the day after his death, for 250 successive days (Irish Times, 2 Dec. 1905). The bequest was, however, necessary to comply with her marriage settlement.
Little is known of Gertrude Hayes’s early life, apart from indications that she was an early adopter of her father’s charitable impulses. She was ‘collector of toys’ for the Workhouse Visiting Society from 1862, while her first known philanthropic donation came at the age of seven when she contributed £5 to the Sisters of Mercy to fund a Christmas dinner for orphans in Cork city (she continued to donate to this cause until at least the mid-1870s). She may have been the Gertrude Hayes who took third prize in botany examinations held in August 1867 by the Museum of Irish Industry and Government School of Science Applied to Mining and the Arts (the final year of that institution’s existence).
Few other details are apparent before her marriage to James Talbot Power (1851–1916), 5th baronet of Edermine and distillery owner. Born on 23 June 1851, he was the second son (of four sons and three daughters) born to Sir James Power, MP and owner of the John Power and Son distillery, Dublin, and his wife Jane Anne Eliza (née Talbot). Educated as a lay student at the catholic seminary of St Mary’s College, Oscott, Birmingham (1863–8), Talbot Power joined his father at the distillery in 1870, where he initially worked as a distiller and brewer (Power’s was one of the ‘big four’ whiskey distilleries then operating in Dublin, alongside John Jameson and Son, George Roe and Co., and William Jameson and Co.). On their father’s death in 1877, Talbot Power and his younger brother Thomas inherited the distillery.
Gertrude Hayes and James Talbot Power were married on 10 April 1877 in Ss Peter and Paul’s Church, Cork (the wedding cake weighed 120lbs and stood five and a half feet tall). Previously resident at his family home at 27 Merrion Square, Dublin, a month before the marriage (and surely in preparation for the union) Talbot Power purchased Leopardstown Park, a handsome two-storey over basement country house situated on 100 acres, nestled in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Far enough removed from the city to serve as a rural retreat, yet within striking distance through its proximity to Stillorgan train station on the Harcourt Street–Bray line (not to mention the nearby Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) harbour), Leopardstown Park was an ideal base for the couple as vibrant members of Dublin’s social and civic scenes.
Philanthropic and civic work
Throughout the marriage Gertrude fulfilled the role expected of women of means in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by immersing herself in various charitable and philanthropic endeavours, including the advancement of opportunities for women. In 1900 she was elected to the council of the Royal Irish Association for Promoting the Training and Employment of Women, established in 1883 to help women secure ‘remunerative employment’ (Burdett-Coutts (ed.), 441). Gertrude hosted the Fresh Air Association at Leopardstown Park at least four times (1888, 1889, 1890 and 1893); the estate was an ideal location for a charity whose mission was to provide countryside excursions for underprivileged catholic children from Dublin’s inner city. On each occasion specially chartered trains brought as many as 500 children to Leopardstown, where the Talbot Powers provided food and entertainment.
Gertrude’s support of the Fresh Air Association was of a piece with the couple’s benevolence towards the catholic church and its charities. Together they made substantial contributions to causes such as St Catherine’s Parochial and Convent Schools on Meath Street, the North William Street Orphanage, the Catholic Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Cabra, as well as supporting the Little Sisters of the Assumption (based on Lower Camden Street) in their mission to nurse the sick and dying poor in their homes. James contributed £100 to fund a memorial for Cardinal Paul Cullen and served on the committee appointed to oversee its completion. The Talbot Powers also supported the church’s activities in the area around Leopardstown Park; Gertrude organised an ‘Irish produce’ stall at a fundraising carnival for St Patrick’s Church, Glencullen, held in nearby Sandyford in August 1906. The Talbot Powers eventually contributed £50 towards the church’s construction (they had contributed a similar sum to the construction of Holy Cross Church, Dundrum, Dublin, in 1879, and later contributed £100 for the construction of John’s Lane Church, Thomas Street, Dublin). Gertrude’s involvement in the locality included assuming the presidency (1906–08) of the Glencullen, Kilternan and Sandyford nursing association.
Apart from their support for the church, the Talbot Powers were also immersed in efforts to improve Dublin’s hospital infrastructure. A supporter of the Dublin Orthopaedic Hospital, James served on the management committees of the Cork Street Fever Hospital and Jervis Street Hospital. Construction of the latter was completed in 1886 and the Talbot Powers were heavily involved in efforts to clear its debts. A series of bazaars were held from the late 1870s onwards to raise the necessary money, with Gertrude first recorded as hosting a stall in May 1879. The hospital’s debts were largely cleared following the staging of an Araby fête in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in May 1894. On that occasion Gertrude hosted a stall named ‘Wakayama Kwankoba’ selling Chinese and Japanese wares. More than 90,000 visitors attended the fête which was the inspiration for James Joyce’s short story, ‘Araby’, published in Dubliners. A member of the RDS for forty-five years, James served on its council from 1889 to 1914, while Gertrude became a lady associate member in late 1891 (women were not admitted as full members until 1920). The Talbot Powers frequently won prizes at livestock and floral fairs.
James Talbot Power continued the family tradition of distinguished prominence in the city’s civic and mercantile milieu, serving, for example, as a director of the National Assurance Company of Ireland and as a long-standing member of the executive committee of the Irish Industries Association (later the Royal Irish Industries Association). He was high sheriff for Co. Dublin and deputy lieutenant of the city and county of Dublin. In December 1882 he was a juror for the trials of two of the men accused of murdering Joseph and John Huddy (known as the Lough Mask murders). Along with lords Ardilaun and Iveagh, Talbot Power played a key role in securing an act of the British parliament enabling the acquisition and clearance of the area between St Patrick’s Cathedral and Bull Alley in Dublin which was shortly afterwards developed into St Patrick’s Park. A leading figure in the Licensed Vintners and Grocers Association, he gave evidence before the royal commission on whiskey and other potable spirits (1908), joining other Irish distillers in arguing that unless distilled in a pot still using malt or grain, no spirit should be called whiskey. His tenure at Power’s distillery saw some innovation – in 1886 it became the first Irish distillery to begin bottling its own product – and a major expansion of its premises on John’s Lane; production rose from c. 700,000 gallons in the early 1870s to more than one million by 1900. By then, the distillery ranged from Thomas Street to the quays on the River Liffey, occupying more than six acres of Dublin’s inner city (three stills survive on the campus of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin; they were restored in 2023).
Politically conservative, Talbot Power sat comfortably as one of the leading members of the relatively small coterie of wealthy catholics who derived their income from professional activities, industry or property (often in combination), and opposed home rule. He attended meetings of the Primrose League and was nominated as a vice-president of the South County Dublin Unionist Registration Association. In 1887 he was accused of supporting coercive legislation, favoured by some within the Dublin Castle administration as a means of suppressing political agitation and social unrest prompted by the National League’s Plan of Campaign. When Spencer Cavendish, marquess of Hartington and former chief secretary for Ireland, stayed at Leopardstown Park in December 1887 in advance of addressing a meeting of Liberal unionists in Dublin, the visit was spun in some quarters as evidence of widespread catholic support for ‘coercionists’. Michael Davitt publicly accused Talbot Power of having been pressured into hosting Hartington by the under-secretary for Ireland, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, as part of a Dublin Castle ‘intrigue’ (Freeman’s Journal, 2 Dec. 1887). Talbot Power’s denial was printed in the Freeman’s Journal on 3 December, prompting Davitt to issue a public retraction.
In 1907 the Talbot Powers were members of the royal luncheon party that dined at the Palace restaurant in Dublin during the visit of Edward VII and the queen. Four years later Gertrude was involved in efforts to arrange an address from ‘the women of Ireland’ to Queen Mary, to mark her 1911 visit. Leopardstown Park regularly hosted visiting dignitaries, including the prime minister of New Zealand, Richard Seddon, in 1897. The earl of Aberdeen (qv, twice lord lieutenant of Ireland) and his wife Ishbel, Lady Aberdeen, were frequent guests. Gertrude followed Lady Aberdeen’s lead in her support for the Irish Home Industries Association, and both Talbot Powers were early supporters of Foxford Woollen Mills (Gertrude was a patron of the Connaught Exhibition held at Foxford in September 1895, where she also presided over a stall displaying the mill’s products).
James Talbot Power inherited the baronetcy of Edermine in December 1914 following the death of his nephew, James Douglas Talbot Power. He had, however, fallen ill at the beginning of the year and was frequently confined to Leopardstown Park thereafter; he died at his home on 3 July 1916 and was buried two days later in Deansgrange cemetery, Dublin, during a private funeral attended only by family and close friends. As he and Gertrude had no children, the baronetcy descended to his younger brother. Tributes were paid at meetings of the many organisations with which he had been associated – the lord mayor of Dublin Corporation, Sir James Gallagher, lamented his death as a great loss to the city: ‘whenever a charity or good work was to be aided they found his name connected with it, and Dublin could ill afford to lose such a man as Sir James Talbot Power’ (Irish Times, 18 July 1916).
Gertrude’s second marriage and Leopardstown Park Hospital
On 4 October 1916, just three months after her husband’s death, Gertrude married Bernard Simon Dunning (1863–1938) in the Church of St Anthony of Padua in the village of Radlett, Hertfordshire. They had known each other for close to two decades, yet the marriage came as something of a surprise to their acquaintances. Sir Horace Plunkett, who lived in Foxrock, close to Leopardstown Park, had long been friendly with the Talbot Powers. A diary entry from September 1917 records a visit from the Dunnings, along with ‘the priest who married them so irregularly’ (‘Diary of Sir Horace Plunkett’, 10 Sept. 1917). Born in the affluent London parish of St George Hanover Square and independently wealthy, by the age of thirty Dunning styled himself as a retired tea planter. He nonetheless worked as Plunkett’s private secretary for eleven years (1891–1902), frequently visiting Leopardstown Park. The 1911 English census records Gertrude and Bernard at the Carlton Hotel in Bournemouth, and it seems possible that their relationship had begun before her first husband’s death.
Shortly before this second marriage Gertrude began auctioning some of the contents of Leopardstown Park and its farm equipment, donating the proceeds to a depot in Cabinteely, Co. Dublin, that supplied surgical dressings to wounded soldiers. Indicative of her intention to sever all links with Leopardstown Park, the auction also pointed to the eventual beneficiaries of that departure, given that the Talbot Powers had no children. In late summer 1917, the house and estate were presented to the British Ministry of Pensions ‘as a permanent gift … for the use of disabled officers and men’ of the British armed forces (TNA, T 1/12508/12092). Gertrude’s offer was first discussed at a meeting of the British cabinet in July 1917, and proved especially timely given the growing need for facilities to treat shell-shocked soldiers. The property was transferred to the ministry by deed of trust in October 1917; following a short period of works Leopardstown Park Hospital admitted its first thirty-two patients in March 1918. For the first fourteen years of its existence, it largely treated first world war veterans suffering from shell shock and other mental traumas and was the only hospital in the Irish Free State offering in-patient psychological treatment to the thousands of first world war veterans in need of such services – the majority of whom were catholic.
After their departure from Ireland (likely to have been completed by the end of 1917), the Dunnings lived at 28 Hanover Court in London’s Hanover Square. They travelled overseas regularly and may have returned to Ireland on occasion – in March 1920 Gertrude requested the return of two traps, a pony and a jennet which she had loaned to the hospital for the previous two years. Gertrude Dunning died on 27 June 1926 at 50 Norfolk Road, Littlehampton, Sussex. She was survived by Bernard; as had been the case with her first marriage, the couple had no children. Her will, proved on 26 August 1926, disposed of just over £70,000. Bernard Dunning inherited a reversionary interest in Leopardstown Park, which he offered to the Ministry of Pensions as a gift in early 1932. It was, he explained, Gertrude’s intention for the house and its grounds to be given absolutely to the British government after her death and for the treatment of veterans to continue, but her will had not quite accomplished this. Her wish was fulfilled when the transfer of the property was effected by a new deed of trust signed at the end of 1932. Operated by the British government for over six decades, it was formally transferred to the Irish health service in 1979. It was expected that Leopardstown Park would continue to function as a hospital for a limited period, after which it would be sold and the proceeds used to support invalided and disabled ex-servicemen. Leopardstown Park Hospital has, however, remained open for more than a century.
Gertrude Dunning’s portrait – undated and by an unknown artist – hangs in Leopardstown Park Hospital’s boardroom, which is also named in her honour. The National Photographic Archive at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) holds a series of photographs taken by James Talbot Power of the streets around Power’s distillery (NLI, JL1–24).