Edward Lee

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Benefactor Edward and Annie Lee were benefactors to many good causes and charities and both were life governors of The Royal Hospital for Incurables in Donnybrook where their son Robert Ernest was Resident Medical Officer, 1912-13. The business had subscribed three guineas a year to the hospital from 1900, eventually increasing the subscription to five guineas. This annual donation would continue long after Edward and Annie’s deaths. Donations were also made to Baggot Street and Jervis Street Hospitals and many other institutions and causes. Edward Lee was a member of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the Dublin Mercantile Association. He had extensive business interests and was a Director of Dublin Distillers and the Mining Company of Ireland. In 1910 he built houses at the back of Lee’s shop in Dún Laoghaire. Named after the birthplace of ‘one of the best women in the world - his wife’, Dungar Terrace was a lovely little street with beautifully designed terraced houses, all rented out for a modest sum. The cost of this development was £7,000, a very large sum at the time. But this all accorded with Edward’s social principles. ‘They had tenants in Dungar Terrace from Dublin, Rathmines and Rathgar. He thought the houses were wanted in Kingstown. They expended a great deal of money in building, but they only asked for a small return on their capital’. 20 In an article entitled ‘Leading Kingstown Traders’, published in The Freeman’s Journal on the 17 th May 1913, Edward Lee was again held up as a caring and progressive employer. ‘One establishment in particular stands out boldly, a commercial watchtower in itself, jealously guarding, as it were, its companions in trade; its house-flag flying and proclaiming to all and sundry that these are the premises of Edward Lee and Co. Ltd. What an asset such progressive firms are to a township like Kingstown may be judged from the fact that within a few years Messrs. Lee have erected in brick and mortar alone property of the estimated value of £26,000, truly a marvellous march of commercial progress for one firm alone. This may be in one sense, however, understood when we consider the unfailing devotion to work and loyalty of the staff to an employer, who 20 Irish Independent. 14/6/1910 36 Edward Lee
certainly, as such, has no rival in the three kingdoms and who, we believe, so ungrudgingly devotes his best interests at all times to their welfare. Not by any means the least claim to notoriety by Messrs. E. Lee and Co. Ltd, is the fact that the firm 25 years ago, voluntarily gave their assistants the half holiday, the subsequent cause of so much argumentative legislation years afterwards’. 21 DUNGAR TERRACE 1910. 1913 Lockout The Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) was founded in Dublin by James Larkin in 1909. It was set up on socialist principles, to help change society in favour of the working class and to give unskilled workers political and industrial clout and bargaining power with the employers. However, the employers saw Larkin and his union as a threat. Under the leadership of William Martin Murphy, owner of the Irish Independent and the Dublin Tramways Company, matters came to a head on 15th August 1913, when Murphy told his staff in the despatch department of the Irish Independent, that if they joined the union they would be fired. As the workers were dismissed, the dispute escalated. The tram drivers stopped work and were also 21 Freeman’s Journal. 17/5/1913 p11 Model Employer and Man of Moral Courage 37
Page 1 and 2: Edward Lee Model Employer and Man o
Page 7 and 8: Contents Foreword by Pádraig Yeate
Page 9 and 10: accommodation for his own employees
Page 11 and 12: are gradually piecing the family st
Page 13 and 14: ook by far on the 1913 Dublin Locko
Page 15 and 16: Jane, who would become Countess of
Page 17 and 18: Tyrrellspass Green 1900s. Photo was
Page 19 and 20: Edward Lee and Co Ltd Dún Laoghair
Page 21 and 22: Social Conscience Edward Lee was an
Page 23 and 24: at Dargan Street in Little Bray and
Page 25 and 26: The Grange By the early 1900s, the
Page 27 and 28: Silver Wedding Illuminated scroll 1
Page 29 and 30: America and Canada 17 which he publ
Page 31 and 32: paragraph in the next day’s issue
Page 33 and 34: his nephew Robert H. Gilbert 19 to
Page 35: Cluster of skyscrapers, New York. C
Page 39 and 40: dismissed. The employers held out,
Page 41 and 42: under the chairmanship of Tom Kettl
Page 43 and 44: influence those of the metropolis
Page 45 and 46: the controversy. Ironically perhaps
Page 47 and 48: ‘Bellevue’, Cross Avenue, Black
Page 49 and 50: laid his broken body in its last re
Page 51 and 52: Unknown newspaper cutting from 1915
Page 53 and 54: kind to them, Edward and Annie must
Page 55 and 56: sister. It is possible that they me
Page 57 and 58: profit for the capitalists, as some
Page 59 and 60: that any firm advertising in certai
Page 61 and 62: Annie Lee and Tennyson Lee 1930s. E
Page 63 and 64: Deansgrange Cemetery, alongside his
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Model Employer and Man of Moral Cou
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Edward Lee

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