At approximately 12:45 in the morning of 4th March 1943, a sixty-foot wall gave way.

The old Waterford city jail at Ballybricken had been built in 1727, rebuilt in 1861, and had served as a prison until 1939, when its closure coincided with the beginning of the Emergency. The building had since been taken over by the Local Defence Forces and used as a storage depot. When a prolonged period of heavy rain saturated a section of the boundary wall – already weakened from years of disuse – the structure failed. It brought down 120 tons of stored turf with it, sending the whole mass crashing onto the terraced houses of King’s Terrace and part of Barker Street below.

Nine people were killed and seventeen injured. The dead were James Roche, aged sixty; his son Thomas Roche, aged twenty; his daughter Maureen Roche, aged sixteen; his son James Roche, aged six; James Barrett, aged eleven; Kitty Barrett, aged nine; Joseph Upton, aged sixty; Patrick Upton, aged fifteen; and Betty Steward, aged two years old.

Rescue workers dug through fallen masonry and wet turf through the early hours of the morning. They were joined in the effort by revellers who had been attending the Beagle Ball at the Olympia Ballroom nearby and turned up to help as news of the collapse spread through the city. Surviving residents were evacuated from the terrace and cared for by the Red Cross over the following three weeks. The jail itself was demolished in the years that followed, between 1949 and 1954. A memorial to the nine victims now stands near the Bull Post on the green area of Ballybricken, designed by Wexford artist Declan Breen.

Barker Street remains a residential street today, situated at the back of Waterford Garda Station – the former jail complex. And it is here that some of those who live in the houses along this stretch have reported something that stops them. The sound of children playing. Not outside, not from a neighbour’s garden, but present in the way sounds are present when they have no clear origin. Those who have heard it connect it without hesitation to the children who died here on a wet night in March 1943 and whose names are now set in bronze on Ballybricken Green.