Lions Club Book Fair and the closure of Bradbury's Bakery

I have been attending book fairs for many years and I have always enjoyed the experience. I never dreamed that Athy would become a book fair venue, but it has now become a favourite provincial town fair due to the initiative of Athy’s Lion’s Club. The club which has given us the Lion's Club book shop almost 16 years ago joined the book fair organisation three years ago. We have now held two book fairs a year since then, availing of the exceptional facilities in Athy’s Recreational Community Hall on the Kilkenny Road. Our next book fair takes place on Saturday, 4th October from 11am to 4pm. Insert logo: Of particular interest to Athy readers is the range of local publications which will be on sale at the book fair. These include Volumes 2, 3 and 4 of ‘Eye on Athy’s Past’, together with the following, all written by Frank Taaffe. CHRISTIAN BROTHERS ATHY 1861 – 1994 150 YEARS OF CARING – A HISTORY OF ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL, ATHY EYE ON ATHY’S PAST VOL. 2 EYE ON ATHY’S PAST VOL. 3 EYE ON ATHY’S PAST VOL. 4 ATHY URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL ATHY GOLF CLUB 1906 – 2006 WHO FEARS TO SPEAK OF ’98 Athy Lion’s Club is the owner of the A.R.C.H. which was initially purchased many years ago by St. Michael’s Parish and the Lion’s Club. In recent years the parish gifted its share of the ownership to the Lion’s Club and the Club arranged for improvements to be carried out on the early 1960s dance hall which many of us will remember as Dreamland Ballroom. I hope to see a big crowd at the book fair on Saturday next. I just learned that Bradbury’s of Leinster Street will no longer operate a bakery which was started by the present owner’s father, Tom Bradbury, in 1938. The Bradbury cakes were very famous during my young days in Offaly Street. In 1988 the famous bakery, then located in a new factory on the Kildare Road, closed down. However, in late 1988 Johnny Bradbury and his wife Clare purchased the Bradbury business in Leinster Street and re-opened the baker there later that year. The closure of Bradbury’s bakery is a sad loss to Athy.

Grave Memorials in St. Michael's Cemetery Athy

It’s almost 40 years ago when with the assistance of FAS, the Industrial Training Authority, I organised a project intended to record all the headstones and grave memorials in the original St. Michael’s Cemetery. Regretfully it was a project which was not completed until many years later. The mammoth task of recording and mapping all the memorials in St. Michael’s Cemetery was eventually done by Michael Donovan, who is one of the unsung heroes of Athy and South Kildare. Michael has devoted many years of his life to recording cemetery memorials, not only in and around the immediate environs of Athy, but also further afield. To date he has completed 42 graveyard surveys, the results of which will be handed over to Kildare County Council to be made available to the general public. For many years tombstone inscriptions were an untapped source of Irish genealogy. They were largely unnoticed, except by those looking for obituary details. The work of copying tombstone inscriptions requires patience and attention to detail and Michael Donovan has spent years in recording memorial inscriptions and by doing so preserving for future generations details of families whose names are no longer familiar to us. He has also photographed the memorials and to date for the 42 cemeteries surveyed he has amassed a collection of almost 6,000 photographs. These, together with the mapping and numbering of graves in the cemetery surveys, ensure the ready identification of the location of every memorial. Grave memorials are an important part of a community’s heritage. They record lives from the past and the various types of monuments or memorials represent in many cases Irish folk art which has survived over the years. A headstone is the only piece of sculpture that most people will ever commission. In Victorian times cemeteries for the rich were gardens of stone, while the buried poor were seldom marked or noted. The local iron foundries provided metal crosses, many of which can still be seen in St. Michael’s Cemetery. The most common iron memorial comprised a cross within a circle with space for a painted inscription. Unfortunately these memorials tend to lose their painted inscription after some years. St. Mary’s Cemetery, where the remains of Workhouse inmates were laid, had quite a number of metal crosses, all of which regrettably were in recent years removed from the graves they marked. In St. Michael’s Cemetery and St. John’s Cemetery, which Michael has also surveyed, there are many fine examples of altar tombs and chest tombs. In St. John’s Cemetery he discovered a small gravestone, previously unrecorded, marking the grave of William Watson who died in 1637. Tankardstown graveyard, which surrounds the original Tankardstown Parish Church, has two 17th century memorials. Throughout St. Michael’s Cemetery can be found many elaborate monuments, mostly the work of 19th century carvers and stone masons. The practice of erecting headstone memorials did not develop until the latter part of the 18th century. Before that many graves were not marked, or if they were it was by footstones, so called as they were small plain stones placed at the bottom of graves. The Shackleton Museum holds two medieval grave slabs, believed to be of the 14th century, which were removed from St. Michael’s Cemetery for safekeeping some years ago. Monumental inscriptions to be found in St. Michael’s cemetery are generally of the genealogical epitaph type where family relationships and dates of birth are outlined. Michael has also recorded interesting supplementary details, generally quotations of a religious nature. One interesting grave memorial located within the medieval church, known locally as ‘the Crickeen’, reads:- ‘This venerable and justly loved Christian died in the 82nd year on 25th November 1849. She closed her edifying life by the fervent practice of those religious duties that ever marked her holy career. Her remains were accompanied to this earthly dwelling by an immense number of every class and creed of the entire neighbourhood which she so long adorned by her eminent and unostentatious virtue. She expired, consoled by her cherished text, from the 6th chap. 55th V of St. John. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood had everlasting life and I will raise him up on the last day.’ In addition to his survey and recording work Michael Donovan, together with Clem Roche, have just completed recording the names of the 3,891 inmates who died in Athy Workhouse or the Fever Hospital between 1871 and 1921. Theirs is a work of great importance, rivalled only by Michael’s extraordinary solitary work in mapping and recording so many cemetery memorials in and around this area. Michael Donovan’s plans for this year are to survey cemeteries in Ballybracken, Kileen Cormac, Kildangan, Timogue, Harristown and Crookstown.

Memories of St. Joseph's infants Boys School

My youngest grandson, Ben, who recently moved with his parents from Cork to Athy started school during the week. This followed a few weeks in Montessori in Athy following on two years in Montessori in Cork. Aged five and a half years when he started in junior infants in the local Gael Scoil it made me reflect on when I started in the all-boys St. Joseph’s School in Rathstewart, almost 80 years ago. I joined my first class on the day of my fourth birthday and was pleasantly surprised to discover a few years ago, on examining the school’s roll books, that another young boy who started that same day was the late Frank English who was six months older than myself. Frank was my closest friend in adulthood, and we shared many holidays abroad including a never to be forgotten trip when we thumbed our way around Northern France in 1962. Nowadays the educational campus on the Monasterevin Road boasts three primary schools while the historic Scoil Mhichil Naofa is located off of Kirwans Lane, where it has always been. What fascinates me is the fact that in my time every youngster made his or her entry to school without any previous schooling experience. No Montessori or creche in those days while today’s youngsters have both. Although I wonder if the infants’ school at St. Joseph’s, in which there were three classes, was in terms of years spent prior to primary school the equivalent of modern pre-school facilities. Since writing the above I have learnt that the three years spent in St. Joseph’s comprised junior and senior infant classes and the first year of Primary School. When we passed to the Christian Brothers Primary School, we immediately entered the second year class. So, St. Joseph’s school opened by the Sisters of Mercy on a date unknown to me was an early example of a pre-primary school facility. Memories of my first year in St Joseph’s are uncertain although I can remember my father collecting me and bring me home on his bike after I had a little personal accident. I was told in later years that my next door neighbour Loy Hayden brought me to school on a regular basis, although I cannot remember what may have been many trips to St. Joseph’s. One memory which I return to often was how Sister Brendan, who taught the second year senior infants’ class, prepared us to receive Holy Communion. She lined up the young boys up around the classroom and got us to stick out our tongues which she would softly touch with a scissors which hung from her waistband. Another memory I have is of the class of boys being marched to the Christian Brother’s School in St. John’s as we left St. Joseph’s for the last time. My memories were of my Dad whom I saw dressed in his Garda Sergeant uniform standing on the footpath opposite Carolan’s (now Winkles) as we passed by. I was obviously delighted to see my father, on what was a proud day for me. St. Joseph’s School founded by the Sisters of Mercy was where they exclusively taught young boys in a three-classroom school which was pulled down when the construction of the former St. Michael’s Church commenced in or around 1960/61. On the day we were brought to the Christian Brothers School we walked in procession by the side of Canon McDonnell’s fine house and the Malt House which was immediately on the Town Hall side of the Canon’s garden. With the passage of time the shops and businesses we passed on the way to the St. John’s Lane School have all changed names or disappeared like the Malt House. The boys of St. Joseph’s School, having gone through junior infants and senior infants, were in first class when they made their First Communion. The preparation for First Communion was done in Sister Brendan’s second year senior infants’ class with the solemn ceremony performed in St. Michael’s Parish Church when we were in the first year of primary school. Communion Day was an important day then as it is today. After the formal Church ceremony we were entertained in the local Convent, although I wonder if my memory in that regard is correct as it may have been the Convent meal provided after Confirmation, that I remember. But of course, the most important part of the First Communion Day was the never to be forgotten coin collection visits to well-known neighbours. If like me you were a “blow in” you had no relations near, so I missed out on the “easy targets” for collecting coins. There was no question in those days of receiving notes as money was scarce for all the families in Offaly Street. My grandson, Ben, continues his education in the Gael Scoil, an unheard of facility in Athy 80 years ago. What a wonderful opportunity it presents to him and his classmates, boys and girls alike, to learn and speak our native tongue, something I was not able to do despite Brother Keogh’s best efforts in secondary school. Education as ever is recognised as a vitally important character builder and current facilities including free books, acceptable pupil teacher ratios and the often-claimed free education are reminders of how far education today has progressed. Contrast this with the 1940s when families stricken by unemployment and emigration found it so difficult to let their children take full advantage of the educational opportunities of their time. How well I remember classmates leaving school at the age of 13 or 14 years of age to take up employment in the local asbestos factory and sometimes as messenger boys in local shops. Life in the meantime has changed and nowhere more so than in the schools once founded and staffed by the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers. Today’s schools, both primary and secondary, are co-educational, unlike the schools of my time when the boys and girls were strictly segregated. Here in Athy the nuns arrived in 1851 and the Christian Brothers in 1860 and over the next 150 years or so provided a first-class education for thousands of boys and girls who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to reach their full potential. We owe a huge debt to the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers. My grandson, Ben will pass through his school years without being taught as I was by Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers. No doubt Ben will have memories to equal those of his Grandpa and I wish him and all the others boys and girls starting school this year every happiness and every good wish for the future.