The story of how piped clean water came to the village is a much simpler one than the saga of the sewers.
There was no public piped water supply in the village until well after World War I. There were two public hand pumps to supply the whole village – one in the square, and another at the bottom of William Street. Unless you had your own private well (which a few lucky properties had) every single drop of water you used, for cooking, washing etc., had to be hand pumped and carried back to your house. And this for a population of roughly 700!
This clipping appeared in the Newry Telegraph in 1890, reporting on a meeting of the Newry Board of Guardians.
On 28th November 1923, a special Urban District Council meeting was held in Tandragee to discuss the feasibility of using McCourt’s Lake to supply fresh water to Tandragee. But no mention was made of supplying Poyntzpass, which was much closer to the lake – less than a mile from it!
1920s – McCourt’s Lake
Then the penny dropped; in October 1924, the Clerk of Newry No. 2 RDC wrote to Tandragee Council to ask if the proposed water supply from McCourt’s Lake could be shared with Poyntzpass. In December 1925, a surveyor reported that the water was of excellent quality, was drinkable even without being filtered through sand, and contained 135 days’ supply at an extraction rate of 100,000 gallons per day.
All of the necessary work must have been done in the next few years, as in December 1928 the Portadown Times reported that the Clerk of Newry No. 2 RDC had written to a Mr Little of Poyntzpass “thanking him for his generous action in connection with the providing of a first-class water supply”.
But James Clowney of Acton commented that:
“…the inhabitants of Poyntzpass were delighted that a pure water supply had been provided [but]…as the times were very bad the inhabitants of the village were not willing to go to the expense of taking water into their private houses”.
The world was on the verge of the Great Depression.
1960s – We Want Better Water
However, in October 1960, the Poyntzpass Ratepayers’ Council wrote to Newry No. 2 RDC to complain about the “putrid and unreliable water supply to the village from McCourt’s Lake” and to demand that the village should instead be connected to the supply from the Spelga reservoir in the Mourne Mountains. Even in the 1960s, many people in the village still used the pumps and carried home water to be used purely for drinking, because of the bad taste of the mains water from McCourt’s Lake.
Some older Poyntzpass residents may remember the cast-iron water hydrant about half-way up William Street on the right. It went by the magnificent name of Glenfield & Kennedy’s anti-freezing, self-closing Lion Mascaron Pillar Fountain (!) and it had a platform for a bucket to sit on while it was being filled.