Cook Street in Dublin was a centre of Catholic printers from at least the 18th Century, and of the broadside ballad trade in the 19th century. Two printers on the street, John F. Nugent and Peter Brereton, produced a large number of the street ballads that are the focus of my research.
November’s find is a long-sought link between these two printers, and evidence of bad blood between them: a cord and a discord.
Nugent was a skilled printer with an established business, recorded as a ‘letterpress printer’ in trade and street directories, including Thom’s directories for 1850 (p1060) and 1851 (p1142), and many others through the 1850s and 1860s. Along with ballad sheets, he printed songsters and an annual publication cheekily based on Old Moore’s Almanac.
By contrast, Brereton has been described as ‘The Worst Printer Ever’ in a Masters thesis by Colin Neilands (University of Leeds, 1983): his ballads are littered with typos. He operated out of his tenement room at 25 Cook Street and from other addresses nearby, and his work may have been hampered by a shortage of type which required the inventive use of letters or symbols in place of the ones he lacked. Brereton’s name never appears in the trade directories, the various premises from which he worked are listed only as tenements.
Because these printers were contemporaries on Cook Street, a number of scholars, including the foremost student of the printed ballad in Ireland, Dr John Moulden, have speculated that Brereton may have worked for Nugent, although there was no clear evidence for this – until now!
This insolvency case reported in newspapers across Ireland and Britain in November 1861 reveals Nugent in the dock, seeking to be discharged from bankruptcy. Creditors who oppose his discharge include a Brereton who worked for him and to whom he owed £14. Another creditor is Beasley [sic, actually Besley] and Co of London, who were owed for a printing machine. This is an interesting insight into the quality of machinery Nugent was using in his printshop. Robert Besley’s machines were ‘state of the art’ in the 1860s. One of them was on display at the International Exhibition in London in 1862, as documented in an engraving in the The Illustrated London News on August 23rd 1862, which is captioned The International Exhibition: Besley’s Type-Cast Machine—from a photographic by the London Stereoscopic Company. Besley (1794–1876) was also the creator in 1845 of the Clarendon typeface, which is still in use today, and the Lord Mayor of London in 1869.
Because the records of companies like Nugent’s are long lost, we would have no details about the equipment in his shop without this court case. The court reports also reveal that the judge accused Nugent of living well beyond his means, spending £175 a year when his profits from trade were only £61. Nugent’s bowdlerised almanac gets a mention in the Belfast newspaper, along with his religion, neither of which feature in court reports I have seen from the rest of the country. ‘The insolvent was a Roman Catholic publisher, who acquired considerable notoriety by the publication of a seditious almanac.’
The insights the report gives into Nugent’s life are priceless. Up to now, Nugent was somewhat of an anti-hero to this researcher, with his eccentric almanac, his amusing rhymes, and the several ballads written in his honour. But the idea of him short-changing Brereton, a poor tenement printer who worked through what were no doubt long, cold nights for him, has made Nugent a more problematic figure. The fact that he had promised to pay Brereton as soon as he had sold his property, but gave him only £4, leaving £14 due, was a cruel blow to a poor man. A paper merchant, Ryan, also only received half of his due.
As for the unfortunate Brereton, I have identified a ballad written by Joseph Sadler that he printed in 1853, although most authorities list Brereton as operating only between 1867 and 1876, when his wife died. According to this court report, Brereton was working for Nugent as a night printer around 1860, a challenging job in the days before proper lighting, which surely contributed to the number of errors in the work of the ‘Worst Printer Ever’.