It was the Christmas news story of 1954 - and, amazingly, it had a happy ending. Éanna Brophy looks back at the events which led to the recovery of three missing Dublin babies
On December 18th, 1954, the last Saturday before Christmas, Dublin's Henry Street was packed with last-minute shoppers. In the rush, one of them, Theresa Berrigan, did something that was not unusual in those more trusting times: needing to buy something in Woolworths, she left her baby, Patrick, outside in his pram while she went into the shop. When she returned moments later, to her horror, he was gone.
The incident triggered a bizarre sequence of events that became the biggest news story in years to hit two cities - Dublin and Belfast. It was to culminate not only in the recovery of Patrick, but also in the discovery in the same house of a little girl who had vanished four years earlier - also taken from a pram on a Dublin street.
A third baby was also missing. Pauline Ashmore was taken from her pram in Camden Street in October, 1954. She had not been found when Patrick Berrigan vanished, and she was still not found when he was tracked down in Belfast. It was to be some weeks before her disappearance would be solved in a dramatic media coup.
The taking of little Patrick from his pram prompted a huge countrywide search. And it provoked a fair degree of panic. Mothers in Dublin and elsewhere were afraid to leave their babies unattended in a pram, even for a split second. People wondered where the baby thieves would strike next. But the vigilance of one woman gave gardaí the break they were looking for.
After a visit to Dublin, Louisa Doherty, from Co Antrim, was travelling on a train to Belfast on the evening of December 18th, and noticed a woman behaving oddly with the baby she was carrying. At one point, she was to tell a court later, the baby seemed to be carried upside down. Doherty got talking to the woman, who said the baby was distressed because it was hungry. No, she said, she did not have a bottle to give it; her sister had given her one earlier, but it had got broken.
The next morning, Louisa Doherty picked up a newspaper after Sunday Mass and saw a picture of Patrick Berrigan, the missing baby. She wrote a letter to Berrigan's mother in Dublin, describing the baby she had seen on the train, and a few days later the police came and interviewed her.
The RUC called to a house in Belfast a few days later and found Patrick Berrigan safe and well. He had been brought to Belfast by a woman called Margaret McGeehan. She had lost two babies of her own, the most recent having been stillborn some six weeks earlier. She soon admitted that she had taken Patrick, and he was reunited with his delighted parents, who lived in Moore Street.
Then came A sensational twist to the story. One of the other children in the house caught the attention of the policemen. Bernadette McGeehan, aged four and a half, turned out to be another missing baby. She was in reality Elizabeth Browne, who had, at the age of three months, vanished from her pram in a crowded Henry Street, where her mother was selling papers. Mr and Mrs Browne travelled from their home in Blackditch Road, Ballyfermot, and picked her out from a line-up of seven children. They had no doubts that she was their Elizabeth - and their identification was confirmed by a birthmark.
McGeehan vehemently denied that she had taken this baby from Dublin. She maintained she had been given the little girl four years earlier by a local woman called Ellen Brown, who had since died. In the court case afterwards she claimed that this Ellen Brown had been "keeping company" for some years with a Patrick McDonagh, whom she described as having "a stick leg" since the war.
McDonagh (who indeed had a wooden leg as a result of a wartime air raid on Belfast) turned up in court and said that he had lived with Ellen Brown in a rented house on Lonsdale Street. In court he gave his occupation as "street vocalist" and said that Ellen had been his singing partner. They had had three children - all boys. She had never had a little girl. They knew McGeehan because she had rented the same house later.
A Dublin guesthouse owner produced evidence that McGeehan had been in Dublin at the time of Elizabeth's disappearance. McGeehan was later sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Elizabeth, who had spent four years being called Bernadette, had been removed to a Belfast children's home, and was returned to her real parents on February 5th, 1955, after the completion of legal formalities.
All these developments had been watched by another Dublin couple, Christy and Margaret Ashmore, of Cashel Road, Crumlin. They had gone through highs and lows of hope and despair as the Belfast saga unfolded. They had hoped that their missing baby, Pauline, might also be found in McGeehan's home, but it was not to be.
Perhaps it was the intense spotlight on the baby stories that prompted a call to the Evening Press newsroom on Tuesday, January 25th, 1955. The caller, a man, offered to sell the paper a story about what he called "a medical wonder". He knew a woman who was about to give birth again - just three months after having another baby. Pressed by the news editor about the birth date of this first baby, he said it was October 19th - the day Pauline Ashmore had vanished.
The only picture of the missing Pauline had been printed in papers all over Ireland, and shown on cinema screens. The Evening Press (then just four months old itself) sent a reporter and a photographer, Jim Flanagan and Harry Stevens, to the address at Oliver Bond Flats that had been given to them by the mystery caller (who insisted on remaining anonymous). There they talked to a Mrs Hughes, whose daughter, Therese Fitzpatrick, was then in the Coombe Hospital to have her baby. Hughes gave the pressmen permission to photograph the baby girl she was minding for her daughter. Then they raced back to the office, printed the picture and compared it to the one they had of Pauline Ashmore.
It matched. They had already alerted the Garda, who now brought the picture to Margaret Ashmore. She had no doubts whatsoever: this was Pauline. The gardaí brought her to Oliver Bond House and she was reunited with her baby. The new evening paper had the scoop of the decade, and the story was at an end.
Medical evidence given in Dublin Circuit Court on February 25th described Therese Fitzpatrick as "unstable" at the time, and her own evidence was that she had not known what she was doing when she snatched the baby from its pram. Her husband told the court that when he came home and found her playing with this baby, he had jokingly asked her where she bought it. Fitzpatrick was given a 12-month suspended sentence, and a kindly Mr Justice McLaughlin expressed the hope that the mothers of Dublin could now stop panicking.