Sunday, 17th June will witness the re-enactment of a timeless journey whose origin is lost in time, when we set out for the Holy Well of Tubberara. Last year the Pattern Day or more properly the Patron’s Day was revived after the lapse of almost 175 years. The Patron was St. John, under whose patronage the Well at Tubberara was revered by the Catholics of this area for generations past. St. John’s Day falls on June 24th but I am reliably told that matters of religious commemoration, no matter how historic, play second fiddle to the demands of Gaelic football. I gather the Lillywhites will (hopefully) be contesting the Leinster Semi-final on Sunday, 24th June and so it was that the Tubberara Pattern Day must step back a week to the previous Sunday. As I am writing this piece in advance of the forthcoming game against Carlow, you will understand my indecisiveness in relation to whether or not Kildare will be involved on St. John’s Day.
Last years outing to Tubberara was marked with wonderful weather and it was great to see so many local people, young and old, coming together in a celebration, as people of Athy and District had done centuries ago. In this, the first year of the 21st century, the Tubberara Pattern Day will start with everybody congregating at the roadside entrance near Bert Bridge at 3.00pm. This is a change from last year when the grounds of St. Vincent’s Hospital played welcome host to the hundreds who had foregathered ready for the journey to the Holy Well. It is planned to hold a number of stations between the entrance gate and the Well itself where the principal ceremonies of the Pattern Day will take place, hopefully again with the benefit of glorious sunshine and in the glow of a resounding victory over our neighbours Carlow on the previous Sunday!
Unfortunately I will miss the official opening of the Credit Union new offices on June 8th. The new offices, opened for the past year or so, occupy what in my days in Offaly Street were two private houses. Indeed the entire length of Emily Row had only one shop which was on the far side of that narrow street, and owned by Mona Sylvester. Now Sylvester’s shop has reverted to residential use, while the Credit Union office has been joined by Kings shop, which like it, now occupies what was once a private house.
The Credit Union was established in Athy following a meeting in No. 82 Leinster Street on St. Patrick’s night, 1968. That night the locals who attended the meeting having listened to an address by Michael O’Doherty of the Irish League of Credit Unions agreed unanimously to establish a Credit Union in the town. The first Board of Directors were Donal Murphy, Jim O’Flaherty, Pat Fay, Richard Mulhall, Patsy O’Neill, Chris McMahon, Paddy Keane, Dermot Griffin, Jim McEvoy and John Quirke. Jim O’Flaherty who worked in the local Post Office was elected first President of the new Credit Union, with Donal Murphy of Sunnyside as Vice-President. Paddy Keane, who with Donal Murphy was an employee of Minch Nortons, was elected Secretary, with Jim McEvoy of Leinster Street as Treasurer and Patsy O’Neill, also of Leinster Street, as Assistant Treasurer.
Quite a lot of time was spent by the Officers and Committee, all of whom were volunteers, in learning the practices and procedures relating to the Credit Union business. When the necessary skills and knowledge had been acquired Athy Credit Union opened for business at precisely 8.00pm on Friday, 31st May, 1969. A room in the Courthouse in Emily Square was from the start and for some years thereafter, the offices of the local Credit Union largely due to the generosity of Tadgh Brennan, then County Registrar based in Naas and formerly a Solicitor practising in the town. The expansion of the Credit Union business later prompted the purchase of premises at the corner of Emily Row next to what was anciently called “Prestons Gate”.
It’s a coincidence that the new Credit Union offices are to be officially opened less than two weeks before the refurbished Courthouse is itself scheduled to have its own official opening. The one time Corn Exchange has gone through several reconstructions and refurbishments since it was first opened for business nearly 150 years ago. Here’s hoping that the Credit Union office in Emily Row and the Credit Union movement generally will prosper in Athy in the years ahead.
I was delighted to meet last week the daughter of a man whose name will forever be recalled in the name of one of our local housing estates. Tom Carbery was his name, hers is now Mrs. Delia Kenny and the estate is Carbery Park which was so called to honour one of Athy’s most famous public representatives. Tom Carbery was a member of Athy Urban District Council and Kildare County Council who died in 1972, just two years before his wife Nora and some 23 years after the death of his only son Joseph. Delia was on a short visit to Athy from her New York home and gave me the opportunity to get first hand information on a man whom I have always regarded as one of the bravest public representatives this ancient town of ours has ever had. More about Tom Carbery and the Carbery family next week.
Thursday, May 10, 2001
Thursday, April 26, 2001
Clerics from Athy, Rev. J. Malone, Mons. Boylan
I was sorry to read in last weeks newspaper of the impending departure of the Church of Ireland Rector Canon Leslie Crampton. He will be a great loss, not only to his parishioners but also to the wider community of Athy. Rev. Crampton is a man of extraordinary gentle demeanour and of what, some might describe as old world courtesy. He is an exemplary missionary, not only for his own Church but for the religious life in general. Nowadays, more than ever before, the laity look elsewhere rather than to those ordained for the Church for guidance and example. Canon Crampton is an exception insofar as he epitomises all that is good in a cleric at a time when clerical and indeed Episcopal example and guidance has not been as it should. His departure for the midlands will be a sad loss for St. Michael’s Church and for the town and district of Athy.
Continuing on the clerical theme, for some time now I have been researching the lives of two Catholic Priests, both of whom by coincidence were born in the Barrowhouse area. Monsignor Patrick Boylan at the time of his death was Parish Priest of Dun Laoghaire and a former Professor of Theology (I think) in Clonliffe College. He was the author of a number of books on religious topics. His father was principal teacher in Barrowhouse National School but I have little or no other information about the Boylan family.
The other priest was Rev. James Malone who was born in 1863 in Dunbrin and who following his ordination went to Australia in 1892. He served in a number of Australian parishes, eventually becoming Parish Priest of Geelong in 1919 where he remained until he died in 1948. Fr. Malone was the author of three books, including a book of poetry called “Wild Briar and Wattle Blossom” published in Melbourne in 1914. He also wrote a book published in 1915 and entitled “Talks about Poets and Poetry” and a book on his travels between Australia and the Middle East which he called “Purple East”. His writings earned him the praise of that famous Irishman, Cardinal Mannix, who referred to the Dunbrin-born Malone as the John Henry Newman of Australia.
Fr. Malone returned to Ireland in 1907 and the local newspaper of the day reported on the 1st of June that year that he was at home from Australia on a visit to his family at Barrowhouse. I believe he may also have visited Ireland in 1928, although I have no confirmation of this as yet.
His book of poetry “Wild Briar and Wattle Blossom” produced 22 years after he landed in Australia included such nostalgic pieces as “The Old Whitewashed Schoolhouse of Shanganamore” which opens with the following lines.
“Through the bogs of Dunbrin, leaping pool after pool,
‘Up and follow the leader’ ‘s the law of the school;
A plunge at the stile with the risk of a spill,
For the best bunch of cowslips on green Cowsey’s hill -
A race for the rath through the long meadow grass,
Though the boldest heart quakes at the dread ‘fairy pass’ -
A leap for the hazel, a rustling of boughs -
Hush ! it’s only the gadfly that’s driving the cows.
A gallop for life to the wild brake of briar,
For the fairies will kidnap the laggards who tire.
A fox breaks his cover beneath the furze-thorn,
And our hearts leap again at the sound of the horn;
A dive through the hedges - away o’er the bogs -
Ho ! the whipper-in holds us as well as his dogs.
On, on to the river, he’s foiled them at last;
So we halt in the furze, but the school-hour is past.
And that’s how the boy took his pathway of yore
To the old whitewashed schoolhouse of Shanganamore.”
I would like to hear from anyone who can give me background information on the families of Monsignor Boylan or Fr. James Malone or indeed the clerics themselves.
I had a number of phone calls in response to the recent reference to “The River Plate Fresh Meat Company Limited” sign exposed on the wall of Hacketts Bookmakers in Duke Street. One such caller wondered if the sign was of pre-Irish Free State vintage. In those days the British Colonial lifestyle saw American bacon imported into Ireland and sold at a penny cheaper per pound than home-produced bacon. American wheat was another import at a time when barley was the principal crop on Irish farms. Was it not, my caller wondered, that same era which saw the importation of Argentinean beef for sale in a local shop in Athy? Nobody has yet identified the persons involved in the River Plate Company or for how long it carried on business at the Leinster Street premises which was later occupied by local butcher Barney Day. I would welcome any information which might throw light on the subject.
Sarah Brennan of St. Joseph’s Terrace passed away recently. I knew Sarah as a very kind and considerate person who went out of her way to help many, who for one reason or another found themselves facing difficult times or seemingly insurmountable problems. She was a good friend to many and I was fortunate to have shared a friendship with her which extended back to the early 1980’s after I returned to Athy following twenty years of wandering. May she rest in peace.
Finally, I must mention, although I’ll return to the subject at a later date, the Pattern Day which takes place in Tubberara on Sunday, June 17th.
Continuing on the clerical theme, for some time now I have been researching the lives of two Catholic Priests, both of whom by coincidence were born in the Barrowhouse area. Monsignor Patrick Boylan at the time of his death was Parish Priest of Dun Laoghaire and a former Professor of Theology (I think) in Clonliffe College. He was the author of a number of books on religious topics. His father was principal teacher in Barrowhouse National School but I have little or no other information about the Boylan family.
The other priest was Rev. James Malone who was born in 1863 in Dunbrin and who following his ordination went to Australia in 1892. He served in a number of Australian parishes, eventually becoming Parish Priest of Geelong in 1919 where he remained until he died in 1948. Fr. Malone was the author of three books, including a book of poetry called “Wild Briar and Wattle Blossom” published in Melbourne in 1914. He also wrote a book published in 1915 and entitled “Talks about Poets and Poetry” and a book on his travels between Australia and the Middle East which he called “Purple East”. His writings earned him the praise of that famous Irishman, Cardinal Mannix, who referred to the Dunbrin-born Malone as the John Henry Newman of Australia.
Fr. Malone returned to Ireland in 1907 and the local newspaper of the day reported on the 1st of June that year that he was at home from Australia on a visit to his family at Barrowhouse. I believe he may also have visited Ireland in 1928, although I have no confirmation of this as yet.
His book of poetry “Wild Briar and Wattle Blossom” produced 22 years after he landed in Australia included such nostalgic pieces as “The Old Whitewashed Schoolhouse of Shanganamore” which opens with the following lines.
“Through the bogs of Dunbrin, leaping pool after pool,
‘Up and follow the leader’ ‘s the law of the school;
A plunge at the stile with the risk of a spill,
For the best bunch of cowslips on green Cowsey’s hill -
A race for the rath through the long meadow grass,
Though the boldest heart quakes at the dread ‘fairy pass’ -
A leap for the hazel, a rustling of boughs -
Hush ! it’s only the gadfly that’s driving the cows.
A gallop for life to the wild brake of briar,
For the fairies will kidnap the laggards who tire.
A fox breaks his cover beneath the furze-thorn,
And our hearts leap again at the sound of the horn;
A dive through the hedges - away o’er the bogs -
Ho ! the whipper-in holds us as well as his dogs.
On, on to the river, he’s foiled them at last;
So we halt in the furze, but the school-hour is past.
And that’s how the boy took his pathway of yore
To the old whitewashed schoolhouse of Shanganamore.”
I would like to hear from anyone who can give me background information on the families of Monsignor Boylan or Fr. James Malone or indeed the clerics themselves.
I had a number of phone calls in response to the recent reference to “The River Plate Fresh Meat Company Limited” sign exposed on the wall of Hacketts Bookmakers in Duke Street. One such caller wondered if the sign was of pre-Irish Free State vintage. In those days the British Colonial lifestyle saw American bacon imported into Ireland and sold at a penny cheaper per pound than home-produced bacon. American wheat was another import at a time when barley was the principal crop on Irish farms. Was it not, my caller wondered, that same era which saw the importation of Argentinean beef for sale in a local shop in Athy? Nobody has yet identified the persons involved in the River Plate Company or for how long it carried on business at the Leinster Street premises which was later occupied by local butcher Barney Day. I would welcome any information which might throw light on the subject.
Sarah Brennan of St. Joseph’s Terrace passed away recently. I knew Sarah as a very kind and considerate person who went out of her way to help many, who for one reason or another found themselves facing difficult times or seemingly insurmountable problems. She was a good friend to many and I was fortunate to have shared a friendship with her which extended back to the early 1980’s after I returned to Athy following twenty years of wandering. May she rest in peace.
Finally, I must mention, although I’ll return to the subject at a later date, the Pattern Day which takes place in Tubberara on Sunday, June 17th.
Thursday, April 19, 2001
Pubs in Athy 1924 and Billy/Skurt Doyle
Two weeks ago I listed the forty Publicans who in 1924 traded amongst the 4,000 or so, souls whom made up population of the former garrisoned town of Athy. Just imagine, one pub for every 100 persons whether man, woman or child. There was little or no full time employment in Athy in the early years of the Irish Free State and the local brick yards and Minch Nortons were what passed for industry in those days. Clearly there was little spare money for drinking which makes me believe that to be a Publican in Athy 77 years ago was not an occupation guaranteed to lead to wealth and fortune.
I made a passing reference in that same article to an industrial dispute in what I believed was Sylvester’s Public House at the corner of Emily Square. I had identified the right premises but apparently by the time the dispute broke out, it housed a Pork Butchers shop operated by a Mr. Conlan. He purchased the premises from Henry Sylvester, who had operated a Public House there in 1924. Details of the Industrial dispute which dragged on for several years are still unclear. Two workers employed by Conlan’s Pork Butchers have been identified as Hopkins and Kavanagh but I have no knowledge of whether or not they were involved in what is claimed to be one of the longest industrial disputes in this country. I would like to hear from anyone who can fill me in on any part of the Conlan’s strike.
Des McHugh tells me with reference to queries I raised in the same article that Stan Glynn’s Public House was subsequently purchased by Townsends and was later known as Smugglers while Thomas Bergin’s is now Barney Dunne’s premises. Matthew Cunningham’s Public House in Duke Street burnt down one Christmas night resulting in the tragic death of a woman whom I have not yet identified. The premises was later rebuilt but not as a public house and it is now incorporated in the front portion of the Super Value Supermarket. Can anyone recall the year of the Christmas night fire in Duke Street which resulted in a tragic loss of life and the destruction of one of Athy’s oldest public houses.
May Lalor phoned me in relation to the same article and was able to identify the location of the various public houses in Athy in 1924. She remembered Stan Glynn and his wife as a kindly elderly couple whose only son died at a young age. Was this I wonder Joseph William Glynn who died in December 1916 when 22 years of age and whose grandfather William Glynn died 20 years earlier aged 85? May also pinpointed Thomas O’Gorman’s Public House in Duke Street as the premises located between what is now Kane’s shop and the vacant Goalpost Public House.
Hackett’s Bookmakers were repainting the front of their premises in Leinster Street during the past week. Did you notice the unusual sign underneath the shop window which came to light when years of accumulated paint had been removed. “The River Plate Fresh Meat Company Limited” was an unusual name for an Irish Firm. Clearly the reference is the Argentinian area which was and still remains one of the foremost beef production areas in the world. But who were the promoters of the Company who so proudly advertised their wares in this way on the main street of an Irish provincial town. Was it the late Andy Finn, a farmer of Milltown, Athy who had a butcher’s shop in the same premises in the 1940’s and 1950’s?
I had a welcome visit recently from Billy Doyle whom I last met at a Kildare Association Function in Manchester a few years ago. Billy, now 64 years of age is a son of the late James “Barracks” Doyle and his wife Elizabeth MacMahon who was originally from Levitstown. Like many of his peers “Barracks” served in the British Army during World War 1 and on returning home joined the Irish Army. The Doyle Family lived in a thatched house at Moneen at a time when it was the only house on what was once the town’s commonage. Moneen or Clonmullin as it is now known is unrecognisable today from the time when Paddy Doyle and his siblings walked the short distance through Moneen lane and Convent View to the nearby school. “Barracks” Doyle who was one of Athy’s enduring characters died on the 20th March 1958 at 65 years of age. Billy went to England ten years later to work in the Lairds Shipyard in Birkinhead having earlier served his time as an apprentice mechanic with Joe Brophy and Jim Kenny in Duthie Larges of Leinster Street. He was able to fill in for me another part of the local jigsaw when he recounted a conversation he had with Jack McKenna some years ago. Jack in an interview with me some time before he passed away spoke of the day he stole a gun from a black and tan who has been pushed through Jackson’s Shop window. Jack told Billy that it was his father “Barracks” Doyle who had sent the Black and Tan flying through the plate glass window following which the youthful Jack McKenna relieved him of his weapon which he quickly passed on to a member the local republican army.
Talking to Billy brought to mind snippets of stories heard and remembered over the years concerning his father “Barracks” and that other great character with World War experience “Skurt” Doyle. “Skurt” who was married to one of the Lawler’s of Ardreigh died in or about 1953 and so far I have been unable to locate his last resting place in St. Michael’s Cemetery. He was one of the most remarkable men of his time and is still remembered by the older people of the Town. I have tried for some considerable time to gather information on “Skurts” involvement in the British Army and his sporting career which spanned many decades. I would like to hear from anyone who can help me piece together the story of the extraordinary “Skurt” Doyle as his is a story which needs to be recorded while his deeds are still part of the folk memory of some of the older people of Athy.
Let me finish off this week by referring to the consultation process which has just begun in connection with the proposed new road linking Dublin and Waterford. The views of the general public are being canvassed as to the best route for this major new road and Athy’s opportunity to meet with the road Engineers was on Monday and Tuesday last. However, information on the different routes being canvassed as possibilities for the major road link will be on display in the Library in the Town Hall until Friday 15th June.
The eventual decision on the chosen route could have a bearing on the ongoing local controversy centered on the Inner versus the Outer Relief Road . If the suggested route nearest to Athy is chosen this would undoubtedly serve as the long awaited Outer Relief Road for the town thereby saving the heart the town from destruction. Might I encourage you to check out the plans for the new Dublin/Waterford roadway at the local Library and make your views known to the National Roads Design Office at Naas telephone (045) 898199.
I made a passing reference in that same article to an industrial dispute in what I believed was Sylvester’s Public House at the corner of Emily Square. I had identified the right premises but apparently by the time the dispute broke out, it housed a Pork Butchers shop operated by a Mr. Conlan. He purchased the premises from Henry Sylvester, who had operated a Public House there in 1924. Details of the Industrial dispute which dragged on for several years are still unclear. Two workers employed by Conlan’s Pork Butchers have been identified as Hopkins and Kavanagh but I have no knowledge of whether or not they were involved in what is claimed to be one of the longest industrial disputes in this country. I would like to hear from anyone who can fill me in on any part of the Conlan’s strike.
Des McHugh tells me with reference to queries I raised in the same article that Stan Glynn’s Public House was subsequently purchased by Townsends and was later known as Smugglers while Thomas Bergin’s is now Barney Dunne’s premises. Matthew Cunningham’s Public House in Duke Street burnt down one Christmas night resulting in the tragic death of a woman whom I have not yet identified. The premises was later rebuilt but not as a public house and it is now incorporated in the front portion of the Super Value Supermarket. Can anyone recall the year of the Christmas night fire in Duke Street which resulted in a tragic loss of life and the destruction of one of Athy’s oldest public houses.
May Lalor phoned me in relation to the same article and was able to identify the location of the various public houses in Athy in 1924. She remembered Stan Glynn and his wife as a kindly elderly couple whose only son died at a young age. Was this I wonder Joseph William Glynn who died in December 1916 when 22 years of age and whose grandfather William Glynn died 20 years earlier aged 85? May also pinpointed Thomas O’Gorman’s Public House in Duke Street as the premises located between what is now Kane’s shop and the vacant Goalpost Public House.
Hackett’s Bookmakers were repainting the front of their premises in Leinster Street during the past week. Did you notice the unusual sign underneath the shop window which came to light when years of accumulated paint had been removed. “The River Plate Fresh Meat Company Limited” was an unusual name for an Irish Firm. Clearly the reference is the Argentinian area which was and still remains one of the foremost beef production areas in the world. But who were the promoters of the Company who so proudly advertised their wares in this way on the main street of an Irish provincial town. Was it the late Andy Finn, a farmer of Milltown, Athy who had a butcher’s shop in the same premises in the 1940’s and 1950’s?
I had a welcome visit recently from Billy Doyle whom I last met at a Kildare Association Function in Manchester a few years ago. Billy, now 64 years of age is a son of the late James “Barracks” Doyle and his wife Elizabeth MacMahon who was originally from Levitstown. Like many of his peers “Barracks” served in the British Army during World War 1 and on returning home joined the Irish Army. The Doyle Family lived in a thatched house at Moneen at a time when it was the only house on what was once the town’s commonage. Moneen or Clonmullin as it is now known is unrecognisable today from the time when Paddy Doyle and his siblings walked the short distance through Moneen lane and Convent View to the nearby school. “Barracks” Doyle who was one of Athy’s enduring characters died on the 20th March 1958 at 65 years of age. Billy went to England ten years later to work in the Lairds Shipyard in Birkinhead having earlier served his time as an apprentice mechanic with Joe Brophy and Jim Kenny in Duthie Larges of Leinster Street. He was able to fill in for me another part of the local jigsaw when he recounted a conversation he had with Jack McKenna some years ago. Jack in an interview with me some time before he passed away spoke of the day he stole a gun from a black and tan who has been pushed through Jackson’s Shop window. Jack told Billy that it was his father “Barracks” Doyle who had sent the Black and Tan flying through the plate glass window following which the youthful Jack McKenna relieved him of his weapon which he quickly passed on to a member the local republican army.
Talking to Billy brought to mind snippets of stories heard and remembered over the years concerning his father “Barracks” and that other great character with World War experience “Skurt” Doyle. “Skurt” who was married to one of the Lawler’s of Ardreigh died in or about 1953 and so far I have been unable to locate his last resting place in St. Michael’s Cemetery. He was one of the most remarkable men of his time and is still remembered by the older people of the Town. I have tried for some considerable time to gather information on “Skurts” involvement in the British Army and his sporting career which spanned many decades. I would like to hear from anyone who can help me piece together the story of the extraordinary “Skurt” Doyle as his is a story which needs to be recorded while his deeds are still part of the folk memory of some of the older people of Athy.
Let me finish off this week by referring to the consultation process which has just begun in connection with the proposed new road linking Dublin and Waterford. The views of the general public are being canvassed as to the best route for this major new road and Athy’s opportunity to meet with the road Engineers was on Monday and Tuesday last. However, information on the different routes being canvassed as possibilities for the major road link will be on display in the Library in the Town Hall until Friday 15th June.
The eventual decision on the chosen route could have a bearing on the ongoing local controversy centered on the Inner versus the Outer Relief Road . If the suggested route nearest to Athy is chosen this would undoubtedly serve as the long awaited Outer Relief Road for the town thereby saving the heart the town from destruction. Might I encourage you to check out the plans for the new Dublin/Waterford roadway at the local Library and make your views known to the National Roads Design Office at Naas telephone (045) 898199.
Thursday, April 12, 2001
Extracts from Minute Books Athy U.D.C.
Minute Books are a wonderful source of information on times past in Athy and in that regard the records of Athy Urban District Council are in the premier class. The very fact that the local authority’s meetings were recorded in minute detail and are retained intact is a glorious exception to the general state of affairs insofar as the records of other organisations are concerned. Particularly so where those organisations are dependent on honorary officers, whose period of office is uncertain and not always marked by a smooth transition from one period to another. As a result valuable records get lost, mislaid or more regrettably destroyed. The problem of lost or destroyed records is not only confined to voluntary organisations, as I found to my dismay some years ago when researching the history of Athy Workhouse. The invaluable Workhouse records had been removed and burned some years previous to my research and the resulting loss is one which can never be recouped.
Athy Urban District Council has a history stretching back to 1900 but the records of its predecessors, Athy Town Commissioners and Athy Borough Councils as far back as the mid 18th century have been preserved and they provide a fruitful source of research for the historian. In the records of Athy Urban District Council successive Town Clerks have recorded not only the decisions made at the Council meetings but also the contributions of individual Councillors. It was while researching the records of the Urban District Council for the purposes of a publication to mark the centenary of the Council that I came across a number of interesting side lights on the town’s history. This week I am dipping into the Council’s Minute Books to bring you a flavour of times past in Athy.
6TH MAY, 1901
The Council adopted by-laws regulating common lodging houses in the town of Athy following a letter received from the local R.I.C. Sergeant regarding the refusal of several lodging houses to accommodate a young girl.
17TH NOVEMBER, 1902
Congratulations were extended to Patrick Brien of Canal Side for saving three children from drowning in the River Barrow at the Horse Bridge on 15th November, 1902.
16TH NOVEMBER, 1903
The Council reported to the L.G. Board in Dublin that the Moneen River was a source of domestic water supply for the townspeople.
6TH JUNE, 1904
For some reason the Council felt it necessary to pass a resolution permitting all persons “to use the seats and the space that they enclosed which are now erected around Woodstock Street pump.”
JULY 1904
The Post Master applied to the Council for permission to erect letter boxes at Offaly Street and Leinster Street and to move the letter box from the Pleasure Grounds wall to the inside of the Railway Station. There were three other letter boxes in the town, with four collections each day and one collection on Sunday.
6TH MARCH, 1905
The Council appealed to all traders in the town to honour St. Patrick’s Day as a general holiday and to close their premises on the day. Posters to that effect were posted throughout the town.
4TH MARCH, 1907
Thomas Plewman raised the issue of unemployment in Athy and following a special meeting two days later the Council agreed to hire extra men for street cleaning for a couple of weeks.
15TH APRIL, 1907
James Duthie, Secretary, Athy Volunteer Fire Brigade confirmed a membership of 27 following which the Council agreed to allow the recently formed volunteer group to have use of the Fire Brigade Engine.
7TH JANUARY, 1908
The Council adopted new market bye laws providing for payment of tolls once goods were exposed for sale in the Market Square irrespective of whether or not, they were subsequently sold.
18TH MAY, 1908
It was agreed that that Council workmen would be allowed to finish work early at 4.00pm on Saturdays for a month trial period.
2ND MAY, 1910
The Irish Automobile Club were requested to have warning posts erected at the main entrances to Athy cautioning motorists to drive through the town at a speed not exceeding 7 miles per hour.
7TH NOVEMBER, 1910
There were 21 cow keepers in the town of Athy and two retailers of milk.
1ST MAY, 1912
Athy shopkeepers agreed by ballot for a ½ day holiday for shop assistants on Thursdays with shops closing at 2.00p.m. This followed the passing of the Shop Acts of 1911 which gave shop assistants a legal entitlement to a weekly ½ day holiday.
20TH MARCH, 1913
The first Council house tenants were appointed by the elected members of the Council. This was a function the members continued to exercise until 1953 when tenancies were thereafter allocated on the recommendations of the Council Medical Officers.
28TH MAY, 1914
Council Workman James Chanders of Rathstewart, a store breaker employed at the Gallowshill Gravel Pit was killed when the gravel bank collapsed on him.
4TH JANUARY, 1915
The Council was told that about 60 children attending National School in Athy were unable by reason of lack of food to take full advantage of the education provided. The Sisters of Mercy provided 36 school children with breakfast each morning before school started. Four years later the Sisters of Mercy were providing 96 children with breakfast.
JULY 1915
As part of its War economy measures, the Council decided to employ one lamp light instead of two as in previous years. It was also agreed to light every second lamp and no lamps to be lit during the summer months.
4TH DECEMBER, 1916
Michael Johnston, Lamp Lighter was granted a war bonus of two shillings per week.
4TH NOVEMBER, 1917
The Council presented an address of welcome to Eamon de Valera on his first visit to Athy.
FEBRUARY 1919
The Council workmen were unionised after World War I and on the application of the Transport Workers Union their wages were increased from 27/6 to 33/= per week for which they worked 52 hours a week in summer and 47 hours a week in winter.
These snippets from the town’s past give only a flavour of life as it was lived at the beginning of the 20th century. The importance of the Council’s records and indeed records of other organisations in the town for the study of our local history cannot be over emphasised. Hopefully more organisations in Athy will take extra care to ensure that their records are preserved and maintained, otherwise we run the risk of losing what may be important elements of the story of the town and its people.
Athy Urban District Council has a history stretching back to 1900 but the records of its predecessors, Athy Town Commissioners and Athy Borough Councils as far back as the mid 18th century have been preserved and they provide a fruitful source of research for the historian. In the records of Athy Urban District Council successive Town Clerks have recorded not only the decisions made at the Council meetings but also the contributions of individual Councillors. It was while researching the records of the Urban District Council for the purposes of a publication to mark the centenary of the Council that I came across a number of interesting side lights on the town’s history. This week I am dipping into the Council’s Minute Books to bring you a flavour of times past in Athy.
6TH MAY, 1901
The Council adopted by-laws regulating common lodging houses in the town of Athy following a letter received from the local R.I.C. Sergeant regarding the refusal of several lodging houses to accommodate a young girl.
17TH NOVEMBER, 1902
Congratulations were extended to Patrick Brien of Canal Side for saving three children from drowning in the River Barrow at the Horse Bridge on 15th November, 1902.
16TH NOVEMBER, 1903
The Council reported to the L.G. Board in Dublin that the Moneen River was a source of domestic water supply for the townspeople.
6TH JUNE, 1904
For some reason the Council felt it necessary to pass a resolution permitting all persons “to use the seats and the space that they enclosed which are now erected around Woodstock Street pump.”
JULY 1904
The Post Master applied to the Council for permission to erect letter boxes at Offaly Street and Leinster Street and to move the letter box from the Pleasure Grounds wall to the inside of the Railway Station. There were three other letter boxes in the town, with four collections each day and one collection on Sunday.
6TH MARCH, 1905
The Council appealed to all traders in the town to honour St. Patrick’s Day as a general holiday and to close their premises on the day. Posters to that effect were posted throughout the town.
4TH MARCH, 1907
Thomas Plewman raised the issue of unemployment in Athy and following a special meeting two days later the Council agreed to hire extra men for street cleaning for a couple of weeks.
15TH APRIL, 1907
James Duthie, Secretary, Athy Volunteer Fire Brigade confirmed a membership of 27 following which the Council agreed to allow the recently formed volunteer group to have use of the Fire Brigade Engine.
7TH JANUARY, 1908
The Council adopted new market bye laws providing for payment of tolls once goods were exposed for sale in the Market Square irrespective of whether or not, they were subsequently sold.
18TH MAY, 1908
It was agreed that that Council workmen would be allowed to finish work early at 4.00pm on Saturdays for a month trial period.
2ND MAY, 1910
The Irish Automobile Club were requested to have warning posts erected at the main entrances to Athy cautioning motorists to drive through the town at a speed not exceeding 7 miles per hour.
7TH NOVEMBER, 1910
There were 21 cow keepers in the town of Athy and two retailers of milk.
1ST MAY, 1912
Athy shopkeepers agreed by ballot for a ½ day holiday for shop assistants on Thursdays with shops closing at 2.00p.m. This followed the passing of the Shop Acts of 1911 which gave shop assistants a legal entitlement to a weekly ½ day holiday.
20TH MARCH, 1913
The first Council house tenants were appointed by the elected members of the Council. This was a function the members continued to exercise until 1953 when tenancies were thereafter allocated on the recommendations of the Council Medical Officers.
28TH MAY, 1914
Council Workman James Chanders of Rathstewart, a store breaker employed at the Gallowshill Gravel Pit was killed when the gravel bank collapsed on him.
4TH JANUARY, 1915
The Council was told that about 60 children attending National School in Athy were unable by reason of lack of food to take full advantage of the education provided. The Sisters of Mercy provided 36 school children with breakfast each morning before school started. Four years later the Sisters of Mercy were providing 96 children with breakfast.
JULY 1915
As part of its War economy measures, the Council decided to employ one lamp light instead of two as in previous years. It was also agreed to light every second lamp and no lamps to be lit during the summer months.
4TH DECEMBER, 1916
Michael Johnston, Lamp Lighter was granted a war bonus of two shillings per week.
4TH NOVEMBER, 1917
The Council presented an address of welcome to Eamon de Valera on his first visit to Athy.
FEBRUARY 1919
The Council workmen were unionised after World War I and on the application of the Transport Workers Union their wages were increased from 27/6 to 33/= per week for which they worked 52 hours a week in summer and 47 hours a week in winter.
These snippets from the town’s past give only a flavour of life as it was lived at the beginning of the 20th century. The importance of the Council’s records and indeed records of other organisations in the town for the study of our local history cannot be over emphasised. Hopefully more organisations in Athy will take extra care to ensure that their records are preserved and maintained, otherwise we run the risk of losing what may be important elements of the story of the town and its people.
Thursday, April 5, 2001
Public Houses in Athy in 1924
Last week the Newspapers featured a claim by a spokesman for the Vintners Association that Athy, described as a typical provincial Irish town, was well provided with Public Houses. It was stated that the town now has 26 Public Houses and at one time in the distant past had 32 Pubs, one for each County in Ireland. Indeed, Athy has always held a somewhat unenviable record in terms of the high number of Public Houses in the town, but today we have considerably less licensed premises than we had in 1924. Would you believe that Athy then boasted no less than 40 local hostelries, all of which were open for business. As you can imagine many changes have taken place in the personnel involved in the Public House business in the intervening 77 years. See how many of the Proprietors of that year you can recall and how many of them are represented today in the same premises by their direct descendants.
Myles Whelan, Duke Street. Joseph Whelan, Offaly Street.
Thomas Whelan, William Street. David Walsh, Leinster Street,
Annie O’Brien, Emily Square. Mary Reid, Leinster Street.
Patrick O’Brien, 78 Leinster Street. John Anderson, Emily Square.
Michael O’Brien, Leinster Street. James McLaughlin, Leinster Street.
Fintan Dowling, 16 William Street. Michael Hughes, William Street.
John Joseph Phelan, Market Square. Mary Doyle, Barrack Street.
Michael O’Meara, 67 Leinster Street. Mary Josephine Timmons, William St.
Eileen Butler, Leinster Street. E.T. Mulhall, Leinster Street.
Michael Malone, 4 Woodstock St. Edward Lawler, 3 Woodstock St.
Jacob Purcell, William St. John P. Dillon, Barrow Quay.
Thomas F. Bergin, Duke St. James McEvoy, Leinster St.
Thomas O’Gorman, Duke St. S. G. Glynn, Duke St.
John Maher, 23 Leinster St. Michael Kavanagh, 18 Duke St.
Matthew Cunningham, Duke St. Patrick Smith, Stanhope St.
Michael McCauley, Leinster St. William Scully, Leinster St.
Patrick Kelly, Leinster St. Michael Crawley, Barrack St.
Martin Brophy, William St. Mary Ann Kelly, William St.
Katherine Conlan, Duke St. Henry Sylvester, The Square.
Myles Whelan, Leinster St. Michael Lawlor, Leinster St.
In those early days of the Irish Free State, Pubs either had a six day or a seven day Licence, the latter Licence entitling its holder to open for a limited number of hours each Sunday. Some of the local Pubs had Special Exemptions allowing them to open between 6.00 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. on the morning of fairs and markets in the town. Only a few of the pubs had names other than the proprietor’s names over their doors. These included the Railway Bar operated by Patrick O’Brien of Leinster Street and the Nag’s Head where Michael O’Brien was the Proprietor. Incidentally, the Nag’s Head was once a Hotel although I can’t say if it operated as such in 1924. The Dublin Bar at 18 Duke Street was owned by Michael Kavanagh while Henry Sylvester operated The Shamrock Bar at Emily Square in what was later Miss Dallon’s Off Licence. Sylvester then had a seven day Licence and his premises was located immediately next to the Leinster Arms Hotel which in 1924 was owned by Myles Whelan. Some years ago I was told of what was claimed to be Ireland’s longest trade dispute which took place in the late 1920’s extending into the 1930’s in Athy and involved employees of Henry Sylvester’s Public House in the Square. Can anyone give me any information concerning this strike which I am led to understand went on for six or seven years.
Eileen Butler’s Public House in Leinster Street was the only Licenced Premises which had a name in Irish over the door. This was the Pub which Tom Flood bought in 1926. Patrick Smith had bought John J. Bailey’s premises in Stanhope Street in 1923 having sold his old premises in Leinster Street to Michael McCauley.
I cannot accurately identify the Pubs owned by Thomas Bergin, Thomas O’Gorman and S.G. Glynn all in Duke Street but I am sure somebody out there will do so for me.
Before 1924 had ended, Mary Ann Kelly who operated a Grocer and Spirits Store in William Street gave up the business and it was the first of the Public Houses listed to close down. Several more have closed in the intervening years but despite this, Athy can still claim to be one of the most “Licenced” towns in Ireland today.
Myles Whelan, Duke Street. Joseph Whelan, Offaly Street.
Thomas Whelan, William Street. David Walsh, Leinster Street,
Annie O’Brien, Emily Square. Mary Reid, Leinster Street.
Patrick O’Brien, 78 Leinster Street. John Anderson, Emily Square.
Michael O’Brien, Leinster Street. James McLaughlin, Leinster Street.
Fintan Dowling, 16 William Street. Michael Hughes, William Street.
John Joseph Phelan, Market Square. Mary Doyle, Barrack Street.
Michael O’Meara, 67 Leinster Street. Mary Josephine Timmons, William St.
Eileen Butler, Leinster Street. E.T. Mulhall, Leinster Street.
Michael Malone, 4 Woodstock St. Edward Lawler, 3 Woodstock St.
Jacob Purcell, William St. John P. Dillon, Barrow Quay.
Thomas F. Bergin, Duke St. James McEvoy, Leinster St.
Thomas O’Gorman, Duke St. S. G. Glynn, Duke St.
John Maher, 23 Leinster St. Michael Kavanagh, 18 Duke St.
Matthew Cunningham, Duke St. Patrick Smith, Stanhope St.
Michael McCauley, Leinster St. William Scully, Leinster St.
Patrick Kelly, Leinster St. Michael Crawley, Barrack St.
Martin Brophy, William St. Mary Ann Kelly, William St.
Katherine Conlan, Duke St. Henry Sylvester, The Square.
Myles Whelan, Leinster St. Michael Lawlor, Leinster St.
In those early days of the Irish Free State, Pubs either had a six day or a seven day Licence, the latter Licence entitling its holder to open for a limited number of hours each Sunday. Some of the local Pubs had Special Exemptions allowing them to open between 6.00 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. on the morning of fairs and markets in the town. Only a few of the pubs had names other than the proprietor’s names over their doors. These included the Railway Bar operated by Patrick O’Brien of Leinster Street and the Nag’s Head where Michael O’Brien was the Proprietor. Incidentally, the Nag’s Head was once a Hotel although I can’t say if it operated as such in 1924. The Dublin Bar at 18 Duke Street was owned by Michael Kavanagh while Henry Sylvester operated The Shamrock Bar at Emily Square in what was later Miss Dallon’s Off Licence. Sylvester then had a seven day Licence and his premises was located immediately next to the Leinster Arms Hotel which in 1924 was owned by Myles Whelan. Some years ago I was told of what was claimed to be Ireland’s longest trade dispute which took place in the late 1920’s extending into the 1930’s in Athy and involved employees of Henry Sylvester’s Public House in the Square. Can anyone give me any information concerning this strike which I am led to understand went on for six or seven years.
Eileen Butler’s Public House in Leinster Street was the only Licenced Premises which had a name in Irish over the door. This was the Pub which Tom Flood bought in 1926. Patrick Smith had bought John J. Bailey’s premises in Stanhope Street in 1923 having sold his old premises in Leinster Street to Michael McCauley.
I cannot accurately identify the Pubs owned by Thomas Bergin, Thomas O’Gorman and S.G. Glynn all in Duke Street but I am sure somebody out there will do so for me.
Before 1924 had ended, Mary Ann Kelly who operated a Grocer and Spirits Store in William Street gave up the business and it was the first of the Public Houses listed to close down. Several more have closed in the intervening years but despite this, Athy can still claim to be one of the most “Licenced” towns in Ireland today.
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Railway in Athy
The recent news that the Arrow service will not be extended to Athy for a number of years yet was disappointing. The railways have long played an important role in the life of the town and with the increasing number of people commuting to Dublin everyday will continue to do so.
Athy was first linked by rail to the outside world in 1846. The following extract is taken from James Cunneen’s History of Athy Parish -
“Apart from a few minor alterations the present Athy Station was the original one. It was designed by a man named Woods, the Architect of many of the Great Southern and Western Railway stations. The siding at Kilberry was built by a Mr. Hodgson who carried out turf production in the area. This siding was later reconstructed for the Bord na Mona factory. Maganey was one of the original stations, while the Kildangan Halt dates from the early years of this century; both are now closed.
On August 4th, 1846 the line between Kingsbridge and Carlow was opened to the public. The first runs were trial trips and they left Dublin at 9.00am and 5.00pm and Carlow at 9.30am and 5.00pm. The first public train to arrive at Athy station was the Carlow/Dublin morning train due in Athy at 10.08am, the train from Dublin was due at 11.46am. The fares at the time of opening were Single - Dublin to Athy 1st Class 6/6; 2nd Class 5/- and 3rd Class 2/10.
In those early days return fares were not available. There were no dining cars or their equivalent in those trains to Athy - not until the arrival of the diesel trains in more recent years. However, in pre-1914 days, breakfast and luncheon baskets at 3/- each and tea baskets at 1/- each could be bought at Kingsbridge and Waterford stations.
Only two trains each way were run at first, as there were not sufficient carriages for more. The third-class carriages on the Athy line, although plain enough inside, were at least covered; such carriages on other lines had no roof at all and sometimes were open to the elements at the sides and often they had no seats. For quite a number of years the second-class carriages had no seat cushions and in fact were little better than the third-class carriages. It is not surprising then that in 1847 the Chairman of the Company complained that members of the middle classes were travelling third-class instead of second, although the third-class intended only for “the poorer classes”. He even complained that “the upper classes” sometimes travelled third-class! Third-class carriages were not completely dispensed with until May 1956.
The first carriages used on the line to Athy were built by a coach builder named Hutton at Summerhill, Dublin. Later, carriages were obtained from other Dublin builders and from England until such time as the Inchicore Works started to build their own. The engines at the time were relatively small, with no cab for the protection of the crew and no brakes except wooden ones working on the wheels and operated by hand. Indeed, stopping the train was a very “tricky business” which had to be helped by another hand-brake in the Guard’s van. Those engines, like many of our engines today, were named - rejoicing in such colourful names as Antelope, Buffalo, Leopard and Pheasant!
At the beginning the line to Carlow was double-track. At the end of the First World War it was singled from Cherryville Junction to Athy in order to provide rails for the Castlecomer branch. Later it was singled from Athy to Carlow to provide rails for the Athy-Wolfhill line.”
A permanent reminder of the difficulties facing the Great Southern and Western Railway Company in laying tracks to Athy remains to this day in the twin level approach road from the town to the railway bridge. This part of Bothair Bui was extensively built on with cottages on both sides of the road. Apparently those living on the north side of the road resisted the Railway Company’s attempts to raise the level of the roadway in front of their houses so a compromise was reached resulting in the raising of the road level on one side only. Indeed the Town Commissioners were somewhat at sea in relation to the erection of the railway bridge and sought the Duke of Leinster’s opinion as to how they should act with regard to the approach to the railway.
The advice offered is lost in time but on 7th May, 1846 the Commissioners were sufficiently assertive to write to the Railway Company.
“Gentleman
At a special meeting of the Athy Town Commissioners held this day pursuant to notice it was unanimously resolved that I should communicate to your Board the decided disapprobation of said Commissioners relative to the approach that is now being made from the railway bridge to the town. The Commissioners now see what is intended to be done and are of opinion that it is the worst plan that could be adopted in as much as it injures the property on the opposite side of the street and entirely disfigures the principal entrance to the town. The Commissioners are aware that they cannot prevent the company from building on their own property, but they will not accept the intended line of road in lieu of the one they had. Trusting that your Board will give this matter due consideration prior to your proceeding further with the works.
I have the honour to be your obedient Servant
Patrick Commins - Chairman.”
The Company’s response is unknown but ultimately the road was constructed on two levels and the Town Commissioners noted with approval on 5th March 1849 that the Railway Company had built “a permanent, useful and ornamental wall adjoining the public road at the Railway Bridge”.
Athy was first linked by rail to the outside world in 1846. The following extract is taken from James Cunneen’s History of Athy Parish -
“Apart from a few minor alterations the present Athy Station was the original one. It was designed by a man named Woods, the Architect of many of the Great Southern and Western Railway stations. The siding at Kilberry was built by a Mr. Hodgson who carried out turf production in the area. This siding was later reconstructed for the Bord na Mona factory. Maganey was one of the original stations, while the Kildangan Halt dates from the early years of this century; both are now closed.
On August 4th, 1846 the line between Kingsbridge and Carlow was opened to the public. The first runs were trial trips and they left Dublin at 9.00am and 5.00pm and Carlow at 9.30am and 5.00pm. The first public train to arrive at Athy station was the Carlow/Dublin morning train due in Athy at 10.08am, the train from Dublin was due at 11.46am. The fares at the time of opening were Single - Dublin to Athy 1st Class 6/6; 2nd Class 5/- and 3rd Class 2/10.
In those early days return fares were not available. There were no dining cars or their equivalent in those trains to Athy - not until the arrival of the diesel trains in more recent years. However, in pre-1914 days, breakfast and luncheon baskets at 3/- each and tea baskets at 1/- each could be bought at Kingsbridge and Waterford stations.
Only two trains each way were run at first, as there were not sufficient carriages for more. The third-class carriages on the Athy line, although plain enough inside, were at least covered; such carriages on other lines had no roof at all and sometimes were open to the elements at the sides and often they had no seats. For quite a number of years the second-class carriages had no seat cushions and in fact were little better than the third-class carriages. It is not surprising then that in 1847 the Chairman of the Company complained that members of the middle classes were travelling third-class instead of second, although the third-class intended only for “the poorer classes”. He even complained that “the upper classes” sometimes travelled third-class! Third-class carriages were not completely dispensed with until May 1956.
The first carriages used on the line to Athy were built by a coach builder named Hutton at Summerhill, Dublin. Later, carriages were obtained from other Dublin builders and from England until such time as the Inchicore Works started to build their own. The engines at the time were relatively small, with no cab for the protection of the crew and no brakes except wooden ones working on the wheels and operated by hand. Indeed, stopping the train was a very “tricky business” which had to be helped by another hand-brake in the Guard’s van. Those engines, like many of our engines today, were named - rejoicing in such colourful names as Antelope, Buffalo, Leopard and Pheasant!
At the beginning the line to Carlow was double-track. At the end of the First World War it was singled from Cherryville Junction to Athy in order to provide rails for the Castlecomer branch. Later it was singled from Athy to Carlow to provide rails for the Athy-Wolfhill line.”
A permanent reminder of the difficulties facing the Great Southern and Western Railway Company in laying tracks to Athy remains to this day in the twin level approach road from the town to the railway bridge. This part of Bothair Bui was extensively built on with cottages on both sides of the road. Apparently those living on the north side of the road resisted the Railway Company’s attempts to raise the level of the roadway in front of their houses so a compromise was reached resulting in the raising of the road level on one side only. Indeed the Town Commissioners were somewhat at sea in relation to the erection of the railway bridge and sought the Duke of Leinster’s opinion as to how they should act with regard to the approach to the railway.
The advice offered is lost in time but on 7th May, 1846 the Commissioners were sufficiently assertive to write to the Railway Company.
“Gentleman
At a special meeting of the Athy Town Commissioners held this day pursuant to notice it was unanimously resolved that I should communicate to your Board the decided disapprobation of said Commissioners relative to the approach that is now being made from the railway bridge to the town. The Commissioners now see what is intended to be done and are of opinion that it is the worst plan that could be adopted in as much as it injures the property on the opposite side of the street and entirely disfigures the principal entrance to the town. The Commissioners are aware that they cannot prevent the company from building on their own property, but they will not accept the intended line of road in lieu of the one they had. Trusting that your Board will give this matter due consideration prior to your proceeding further with the works.
I have the honour to be your obedient Servant
Patrick Commins - Chairman.”
The Company’s response is unknown but ultimately the road was constructed on two levels and the Town Commissioners noted with approval on 5th March 1849 that the Railway Company had built “a permanent, useful and ornamental wall adjoining the public road at the Railway Bridge”.
Thursday, March 22, 2001
Local Authority Housing Schemes in Athy
Housing is viewed by the general public as the Urban Council’s main contribution to the development of the town. This is despite the importance of roads, water supply and sewerage systems to sustaining adequate infrastructures for the towns population.
The role of local authorities in public housing was re-affirmed and promulgated, if not for the first time, in the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. An earlier Act, The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act, 1851 which empowered Town Commissioners to build houses for workers was a failure as it depended as did the 1890 Act on local rates to finance house building. A central housing fund was first established in 1908 to assist Urban Councils in providing houses for those in need. Athy Urban District Council completed it’s first housing scheme consisting of twenty-two houses one year before the outbreak of World War I. The houses were at Meeting Lane, St. Michael’s Terrace and St. Martin’s Terrace and the tenants appointed were described by the Town Clerk as “artisans rather than members of the labouring classes”.
The first World War and the Irish War of Independence delayed the Urban Council’s plans for further housing schemes in the town. These difficulties however were cleared when in 1923 the Council advertised for tenders for six houses at the Bleach. P.J. Watchorn & Sons of Dublin quoted £2,898.9s.0d. which was accepted and they were asked to build an extra house at the same rate. When Watchorns later increased their tender, D. & J. Carbery of Athy submitted a revised tender for eight houses at £450 each. These houses were completed by the local firm before the end of March 1924 when nine applications were received by the Urban Council for the eight new houses known as Bleach Cottages.
In October 1929 the Urban Council under the Chairmanship of Patrick Dooley of Leinster Street sought to further it’s plans for Council housing with the appointment of Mr. D. Heaney as Consulting Architect. The Council’s Housing Committee which had been asked to inspect the areas of the town suitable for housing brought to a meeting of the Council on 16th October his recommendations. They were advised to acquire the Gaol field on the Carlow Road of about 2 acres 26 perches owned by Miss Kilbride, together with Peter P. Doyle’s field near the County Home and Dr. Jeremiah O’Neill’s field on the Carlow Road. This latter field was in excess of 6 ½ acres. The Housing Committee agreed to review it’s recommendations and a week later it’s Members, accompanied by Mr. Heaney Architect, the Town Clerk John W. Lawler(?) and the Town Overseer Bland Bramley, inspected nine possible housing sites around the town. Apart from the three sites already mentioned others visited were Hollands field at Geraldine and another field owned by the same family adjoining the Showgrounds on the Dublin Road. The ruined and vacant malthouse at Woodstock Street owned by the McHugh family was also inspected, as were ruins at St. James Place, Rigney’s field at Blackparks and Sylvesters field at the Bleach.
At a subsequent meeting on 4th November, 1929 the Council agreed to acquire the following :-
1. The Gaol Field on the Carlow Road.
2. Dr. J. O’Neill’s field on the Carlow Road.
3. McHugh’s Malt store on Woodstock Street.
4. P.P. Doyle’s field in Barrack Street.
Councillors P. Dooley, F.R. Jackson, Tom Carbery and Bridget Darby were appointed to interview the various owners and negotiate the purchase of the relevant sites.
The following January Mr. Strahan, a housing inspector with the Department of Local Government, visited Athy and accompanied by the Town Clerk did a house to house inspection and found 316 houses in the town unfit for human habitation and 27 houses considerably below normal standards but which might be made fit. Soon thereafter the house plans prepared by D. Heaney, Architect for the various sites already ear marked but not yet acquired by the Council were approved by the Urban Council. At the same time Messrs Stanton Limited advised the Council that following their Engineer’s evaluation of the town’s water supply scheme it was clear that “the present supply is totally inadequate to meet the demands of businesses in Athy.” Undaunted the Council pressed ahead with it’s housing plans and on 2nd March, 1930 passed a Motion proposed by Michael Malone and seconded by Tom Carbery :-
“When advertising for the building of houses in Athy that local labour be employed and local housing labours wages be paid and also that all doors, windows and window frames and cement blocks be made in Athy.”
In April 1930 Athy Urban District Council advertised for tenders to build 36 houses in the Gaol field on the Carlow Road, 14 houses in Rigney’s field at Blackparks and 9 houses on McHugh’s site at Woodstock Street. The tender of D. & J. Carbery of Athy was accepted for all of the houses and duly approved by the Department of Local Government which agreed to pay a Grant of £72.00 to the Urban District Council for each of the 59 houses. The Council’s third housing scheme commenced on June 30th with Captain H.B. Foy of 7 Percy Place, Dublin as Clerk of Works at a salary of five guineas a week. Legal problems were encountered with the McHughs and Rigneys sites and Carberys Building Contractors continued only with the building work on the Gaol field house site. On 29th July the Rigneys site was abandoned due to the title problems and a decision was made to acquire McHugh’s site by compulsory Purchase Order.
By October 1930 the Council Minute Book records the Architect’s Report on the progress of the houses under construction in “St. Patrick’s Avenue, Carlow Road.” Strangely this was the first and only reference to the naming of the Gaol field housing site after the country’s patron Saint and no record exists of the Council’s decision to use that name. While the houses were still in the course of construction the Council agreed to have electric lights and liffey ranges installed. The local electrician, J. Hutchinson of Leinster Street, successfully tendered to install electric lights in the 36 houses for which he was to receive £175. The possible installation of baths in 12 of the houses was also considered but deferred until tenants were appointed and their views canvassed on the issue.
The role of local authorities in public housing was re-affirmed and promulgated, if not for the first time, in the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. An earlier Act, The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act, 1851 which empowered Town Commissioners to build houses for workers was a failure as it depended as did the 1890 Act on local rates to finance house building. A central housing fund was first established in 1908 to assist Urban Councils in providing houses for those in need. Athy Urban District Council completed it’s first housing scheme consisting of twenty-two houses one year before the outbreak of World War I. The houses were at Meeting Lane, St. Michael’s Terrace and St. Martin’s Terrace and the tenants appointed were described by the Town Clerk as “artisans rather than members of the labouring classes”.
The first World War and the Irish War of Independence delayed the Urban Council’s plans for further housing schemes in the town. These difficulties however were cleared when in 1923 the Council advertised for tenders for six houses at the Bleach. P.J. Watchorn & Sons of Dublin quoted £2,898.9s.0d. which was accepted and they were asked to build an extra house at the same rate. When Watchorns later increased their tender, D. & J. Carbery of Athy submitted a revised tender for eight houses at £450 each. These houses were completed by the local firm before the end of March 1924 when nine applications were received by the Urban Council for the eight new houses known as Bleach Cottages.
In October 1929 the Urban Council under the Chairmanship of Patrick Dooley of Leinster Street sought to further it’s plans for Council housing with the appointment of Mr. D. Heaney as Consulting Architect. The Council’s Housing Committee which had been asked to inspect the areas of the town suitable for housing brought to a meeting of the Council on 16th October his recommendations. They were advised to acquire the Gaol field on the Carlow Road of about 2 acres 26 perches owned by Miss Kilbride, together with Peter P. Doyle’s field near the County Home and Dr. Jeremiah O’Neill’s field on the Carlow Road. This latter field was in excess of 6 ½ acres. The Housing Committee agreed to review it’s recommendations and a week later it’s Members, accompanied by Mr. Heaney Architect, the Town Clerk John W. Lawler(?) and the Town Overseer Bland Bramley, inspected nine possible housing sites around the town. Apart from the three sites already mentioned others visited were Hollands field at Geraldine and another field owned by the same family adjoining the Showgrounds on the Dublin Road. The ruined and vacant malthouse at Woodstock Street owned by the McHugh family was also inspected, as were ruins at St. James Place, Rigney’s field at Blackparks and Sylvesters field at the Bleach.
At a subsequent meeting on 4th November, 1929 the Council agreed to acquire the following :-
1. The Gaol Field on the Carlow Road.
2. Dr. J. O’Neill’s field on the Carlow Road.
3. McHugh’s Malt store on Woodstock Street.
4. P.P. Doyle’s field in Barrack Street.
Councillors P. Dooley, F.R. Jackson, Tom Carbery and Bridget Darby were appointed to interview the various owners and negotiate the purchase of the relevant sites.
The following January Mr. Strahan, a housing inspector with the Department of Local Government, visited Athy and accompanied by the Town Clerk did a house to house inspection and found 316 houses in the town unfit for human habitation and 27 houses considerably below normal standards but which might be made fit. Soon thereafter the house plans prepared by D. Heaney, Architect for the various sites already ear marked but not yet acquired by the Council were approved by the Urban Council. At the same time Messrs Stanton Limited advised the Council that following their Engineer’s evaluation of the town’s water supply scheme it was clear that “the present supply is totally inadequate to meet the demands of businesses in Athy.” Undaunted the Council pressed ahead with it’s housing plans and on 2nd March, 1930 passed a Motion proposed by Michael Malone and seconded by Tom Carbery :-
“When advertising for the building of houses in Athy that local labour be employed and local housing labours wages be paid and also that all doors, windows and window frames and cement blocks be made in Athy.”
In April 1930 Athy Urban District Council advertised for tenders to build 36 houses in the Gaol field on the Carlow Road, 14 houses in Rigney’s field at Blackparks and 9 houses on McHugh’s site at Woodstock Street. The tender of D. & J. Carbery of Athy was accepted for all of the houses and duly approved by the Department of Local Government which agreed to pay a Grant of £72.00 to the Urban District Council for each of the 59 houses. The Council’s third housing scheme commenced on June 30th with Captain H.B. Foy of 7 Percy Place, Dublin as Clerk of Works at a salary of five guineas a week. Legal problems were encountered with the McHughs and Rigneys sites and Carberys Building Contractors continued only with the building work on the Gaol field house site. On 29th July the Rigneys site was abandoned due to the title problems and a decision was made to acquire McHugh’s site by compulsory Purchase Order.
By October 1930 the Council Minute Book records the Architect’s Report on the progress of the houses under construction in “St. Patrick’s Avenue, Carlow Road.” Strangely this was the first and only reference to the naming of the Gaol field housing site after the country’s patron Saint and no record exists of the Council’s decision to use that name. While the houses were still in the course of construction the Council agreed to have electric lights and liffey ranges installed. The local electrician, J. Hutchinson of Leinster Street, successfully tendered to install electric lights in the 36 houses for which he was to receive £175. The possible installation of baths in 12 of the houses was also considered but deferred until tenants were appointed and their views canvassed on the issue.
Thursday, March 15, 2001
Women in Local History
The contribution of women in Irish society was in times past rarely viewed as being equal to that of their male counterparts. I was prompted to reflect on this when I was asked to give a talk to members of the local ICA guild. The audience was exclusively female and so I felt it appropriate to speak of those female achievers or pioneers of previous generations in our local society who in some way or other helped to change society’s attitude towards women in general.
One of the most important professions today is that of nursing but it was not always so. Up to the middle of the 19th century our own local hospital which was then a workhouse was staffed during the day by a Workhouse Master and a number of helpers, none of whom had any medical qualifications. At night time the workhouse inmates were locked in and elderly women inmates were delegated the task of looking after the sick until day break arrived. The Crimean War of 1854 was the catalyst for change which resulted in nursing becoming a reputable reputation and Florence Nightingale was the instigator of this change. She applied to the English War Office for permission to travel to the Crimea to nurse the soldiers who were dying in their thousands because of lack of adequate medical care. She was assisted in this work by several young women including Sisters of Mercy from Irish Convents including Carlow and Kinsale. As a result of their work the very first training school for nurses was set up in England at the conclusion of the Crimean War. It was soon afterwards that the Sisters of Mercy in Athy Convent began to visit the patients in the local workhouse and before long they were invited to take over responsibility for all nursing care in the workhouse hospital. In this the Sisters of Mercy, who had been trained as teachers, were pioneers and innovators of their generation.
Another female pioneer or achiever was the Ballitore based Quaker writer and post mistress Mary Leadbetter who is today remembered for her published works. The most memorable of those, “The Leadbetter Papers” incorporating “The Annals of Ballitore” were published long after she died. During her own lifetime she published several books ranging from poems to letters of her parents Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton. Her “Cottage Dialogues” and “Cottage Biographies” are perhaps her best known works, apart from the “Ballitore Annals”. Mary Leadbetter was a pioneer in terms of her literary achievements, whose published works added enormously to the importance and relevance of female writers of our time and her time.
Several generations after Mary Leadbetter came Ann O’Neill-Barna, pen-name of Ann Raleigh, the American-born wife of an Irishman who lived for a number of years in the 1950’s at Kilberry, just a few miles outside Athy. Her contribution to the literary wealth of the area is to be found in her book “Himself and I” published in 1958. She gave an amusing account of life in Kilberry and Athy of the 1950’s dealing with different aspects of country and town life in a delightful and at all times comical way. Do you remember her account of Mary from Dublin, a well-known character from our past who each week manned a fish and fruit stall in Emily Square.
“The one elaborate stall which had place of honour in front of the Square was run by Mary from Dublin …. She was a scrawny dark little thing with snapping black eyes, lank black hair and a toothy but engaging smile. She wore a shapeless overcoat and an ancient cloche hat … She controlled everything with a loud sharp voice …. Chanting ‘cahbages and tomahtoes, ahpricocks, ripe bahnanhnas ….. ‘Never mind the green dearie it is only the outside. I’ll peel one for you.’ She took up a banana and held it high and with dramatic gestures peeled four strips until it was half done. The banana was unripe and hard as a rock. ‘I’m sorry it is not ripe enough’ I said feeling very embarrassed at the wretched banana which looked so exposed and at the silent crowd watching all this with bated breath. Mary snorted ‘not ripe sez she’ to the crowd in a voice that carried for miles, ‘not ripe! after me stripping me bahnahna for her”.
Ann Raleigh was an achiever and a pioneer as indeed was the stallholder Mary herself whom the Kilberry-based writer so vividly captured in her book “Himself and I”.
A different kind of pioneering spirit is attributable to another local woman Brigid Darby, the first woman elected as a public representative to Athy’s Town Council. She was so elected in 1928 and served as an Urban Councillor until 1942 when she stood down. In the meantime she served her local community as a member of Kildare County Council, the Vocational Education Committee and the County Committee of Agriculture. A teacher in Churchtown National School and later its Principal she first came to prominence when during the influenza epidemic of 1918/19 she helped to organise a committee of local women to provide food and assistance for the poor families of the area. Brigid was also secretary of the Gaelic League in Athy and throughout her time as a public representative played an enormously important part in improving the stock of Council houses in the town. Her close relationship with the various members of the Fianna Fail government first elected in 1932 and especially the Minister for Local Government Sean T. O’Callaigh was to Athy’s advantage when funding for Slum Clearance Programmes and new house programmes were being allocated in the 1930’s. She was an achiever and a pioneer in terms of her public representative role and as a community activist.
Another group of pioneers in the very real sense of the word were the young girls who between 1849/51 left Athy Workhouse to travel to Plymouth from where they journeyed to Australia as part of an Orphan Emigration Scheme. They were all local girls whose parents had died or had abandoned them in the Workhouse. As such they were regarded as a financial burden on the landowners who paid rates to fund the operation of Athy Workhouse. The Orphan Emigration Scheme was seen as an opportunity to off load from Irish Workhouses young unfortunate females while at the same time providing a much needed counterbalance to the largely male convict population of Australia. Those young girls who left Athy Workhouse as part of the Orphan Emigration Scheme to travel to Australia were truly of pioneering stock.
The ladies of the local ICA Guild whom I addressed on the changing attitudes to women in our society themselves played no small part in pioneering the breakthrough for Irish women. But theirs is a story for another day.
One of the most important professions today is that of nursing but it was not always so. Up to the middle of the 19th century our own local hospital which was then a workhouse was staffed during the day by a Workhouse Master and a number of helpers, none of whom had any medical qualifications. At night time the workhouse inmates were locked in and elderly women inmates were delegated the task of looking after the sick until day break arrived. The Crimean War of 1854 was the catalyst for change which resulted in nursing becoming a reputable reputation and Florence Nightingale was the instigator of this change. She applied to the English War Office for permission to travel to the Crimea to nurse the soldiers who were dying in their thousands because of lack of adequate medical care. She was assisted in this work by several young women including Sisters of Mercy from Irish Convents including Carlow and Kinsale. As a result of their work the very first training school for nurses was set up in England at the conclusion of the Crimean War. It was soon afterwards that the Sisters of Mercy in Athy Convent began to visit the patients in the local workhouse and before long they were invited to take over responsibility for all nursing care in the workhouse hospital. In this the Sisters of Mercy, who had been trained as teachers, were pioneers and innovators of their generation.
Another female pioneer or achiever was the Ballitore based Quaker writer and post mistress Mary Leadbetter who is today remembered for her published works. The most memorable of those, “The Leadbetter Papers” incorporating “The Annals of Ballitore” were published long after she died. During her own lifetime she published several books ranging from poems to letters of her parents Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton. Her “Cottage Dialogues” and “Cottage Biographies” are perhaps her best known works, apart from the “Ballitore Annals”. Mary Leadbetter was a pioneer in terms of her literary achievements, whose published works added enormously to the importance and relevance of female writers of our time and her time.
Several generations after Mary Leadbetter came Ann O’Neill-Barna, pen-name of Ann Raleigh, the American-born wife of an Irishman who lived for a number of years in the 1950’s at Kilberry, just a few miles outside Athy. Her contribution to the literary wealth of the area is to be found in her book “Himself and I” published in 1958. She gave an amusing account of life in Kilberry and Athy of the 1950’s dealing with different aspects of country and town life in a delightful and at all times comical way. Do you remember her account of Mary from Dublin, a well-known character from our past who each week manned a fish and fruit stall in Emily Square.
“The one elaborate stall which had place of honour in front of the Square was run by Mary from Dublin …. She was a scrawny dark little thing with snapping black eyes, lank black hair and a toothy but engaging smile. She wore a shapeless overcoat and an ancient cloche hat … She controlled everything with a loud sharp voice …. Chanting ‘cahbages and tomahtoes, ahpricocks, ripe bahnanhnas ….. ‘Never mind the green dearie it is only the outside. I’ll peel one for you.’ She took up a banana and held it high and with dramatic gestures peeled four strips until it was half done. The banana was unripe and hard as a rock. ‘I’m sorry it is not ripe enough’ I said feeling very embarrassed at the wretched banana which looked so exposed and at the silent crowd watching all this with bated breath. Mary snorted ‘not ripe sez she’ to the crowd in a voice that carried for miles, ‘not ripe! after me stripping me bahnahna for her”.
Ann Raleigh was an achiever and a pioneer as indeed was the stallholder Mary herself whom the Kilberry-based writer so vividly captured in her book “Himself and I”.
A different kind of pioneering spirit is attributable to another local woman Brigid Darby, the first woman elected as a public representative to Athy’s Town Council. She was so elected in 1928 and served as an Urban Councillor until 1942 when she stood down. In the meantime she served her local community as a member of Kildare County Council, the Vocational Education Committee and the County Committee of Agriculture. A teacher in Churchtown National School and later its Principal she first came to prominence when during the influenza epidemic of 1918/19 she helped to organise a committee of local women to provide food and assistance for the poor families of the area. Brigid was also secretary of the Gaelic League in Athy and throughout her time as a public representative played an enormously important part in improving the stock of Council houses in the town. Her close relationship with the various members of the Fianna Fail government first elected in 1932 and especially the Minister for Local Government Sean T. O’Callaigh was to Athy’s advantage when funding for Slum Clearance Programmes and new house programmes were being allocated in the 1930’s. She was an achiever and a pioneer in terms of her public representative role and as a community activist.
Another group of pioneers in the very real sense of the word were the young girls who between 1849/51 left Athy Workhouse to travel to Plymouth from where they journeyed to Australia as part of an Orphan Emigration Scheme. They were all local girls whose parents had died or had abandoned them in the Workhouse. As such they were regarded as a financial burden on the landowners who paid rates to fund the operation of Athy Workhouse. The Orphan Emigration Scheme was seen as an opportunity to off load from Irish Workhouses young unfortunate females while at the same time providing a much needed counterbalance to the largely male convict population of Australia. Those young girls who left Athy Workhouse as part of the Orphan Emigration Scheme to travel to Australia were truly of pioneering stock.
The ladies of the local ICA Guild whom I addressed on the changing attitudes to women in our society themselves played no small part in pioneering the breakthrough for Irish women. But theirs is a story for another day.
Thursday, March 8, 2001
Athy G.F.C.
Eoghan Corry in his centenary history of the GAA in County Kildare stated that “Athy, a town of British Soldiers and public houses was an unlikely venue for a Gaelic revival. It happened in the 1920’s”. The revival Corry referred to was due in large measure to a teacher in the Christian Brothers School, Athy by the name of Seamus Malone. He served as club secretary for Athy GFC for a number of years before leaving for a teaching post in Waterford in or about 1928. The Athy Gaelic Football Club had enjoyed little success in its early years and following a defeat in the Junior Final of 1913 the Club’s fortunes began to wane. Recruitment for regiments fighting in World War I also played a significant part in the demise of Gaelic football in Athy during the War years. Indeed Corry claimed that “Athy provided more British Army recruits, two thousand in all, for the first World War than any other town in the 26 counties.” In that he was incorrect, although Athy’s contribution to the War was proportionately greater than other Irish towns when comparisons are made on a population basis.
Seamus Malone’s importance to Gaelic football in Athy was his part in establishing a minor club known as “The Young Emmets Gaelic Football Club” which catered for under-18 footballers, there being insufficient Senior players left in Athy at that stage. The Young Emmets rented a playing field from the South Kildare Agricultural Society and this was later to be purchased by the local club and developed as Geraldine Park. As the Young Emmet players grew in years the Club assumed senior status and was re-graded as such in 1921.
Over the years the Athy Club known at different times as Geraldine Football Club, The Young Emmets Gaelic Football Club and since December 1945 as Geraldine Hurling and Gaelic Football Club has been served by dedicated administrators. In the early years Seamus Malone and the J.A. Lawlor Town Clerk were to the forefront of the club’s affairs, while Bill Mahon of Sawyerswood served as Club Chairman from 1928 to 1945. Another whose name is synonymous with the GAA in Athy is Fintan Brennan, District Court Clerk and one-time Chairman of the Leinster Council. John W. Kehoe, Publican of Offaly Street, Joe Murphy, Railway company employee of Offaly Street and Andy Smith, Publican of Leinster Street were other long-serving members of the GAA Club in Athy. There are many others who made a major contribution to Gaelic football in the town, many of whom are now dead and in many cases forgotten by the present generation.
A couple of Sundays past the current members of Athy Gaelic Football Club came together to pay a tribute to two members of the Club who between them have 134 years of involvement with Gaelic football in Athy. Both of the men have many things in common. Neither are from the town of Athy or even from the County of Kildare. One is from Baileboro, Co. Cavan, the other from Tullamore near Listowel in Co. Kerry. Both Tim O’Sullivan and Barney Dunne have served the Athy Gaelic Football Club as players, Committee Members and as Club Secretaries in the past.
Tim O’Sullivan first came to Athy in the week before Christmas 1937 to work as a Chemist’s assistant with J.J. Collins in Duke Street. As expected of somebody from the Kingdom he joined Athy Gaelic Football Club and togged out on a few occasions but without much success. Tim played junior football for Athy for several years and was a sub on the senior team when it played the first round of the 1942 championship. Unfortunately when Athy won that championship in a replay against Carbery later in the year Tim was not on the panel. His forte was on the administrative side of club affairs and he served as a committee member for some years from 1945 and in 1953 was appointed Club Secretary. He held that position for the following four years which were lean years for the club both in terms of finance and success on the football field. This was nothing new for the Athy Gaelic Football Club as borne out by a reference in the Club minutes of January 1946 when the then Club Secretary reported that he had managed to buy a football cover and then went on to report to his fellow committee members “that there was every chance of getting a bladder”. Tim was appointed to the Geraldine Park Grounds Committee in or about 1951 and served as Chairman of that Committee from 1961-1963. He is currently the President of Athy Gaelic Football Club and is justifiably proud of the fact that he has attended every Annual General Meeting of Athy Gaelic Football Club since 1938.
Barney Dunne came to Athy from Baileboro in County Cavan in November 1931 to work as a barman in Mrs. Margaret O’Meara’s pub in Leinster Street. Bar Manager there at the time was the earlier-mentioned Andy Smith, another Co. Cavan man who was later to open up his own public house in Leinster Street. As a fit and big young man from the footballing county of Cavan Barney was a great acquisition for the local Club and he was soon togging out for Athy alongside the legendary Paul Matthews, the Ardee County Louth man who came to Athy in 1925.
Barney was a member of the first Athy team to win a senior championship in 1933 when Athy defeated Rathdangan by 2-6 to 1-4. That first success was achieved after Athy’s senior teams had been defeated in three previous county finals, 1923, 1926 and 1927. The 1933 victory was followed by a second championship win the following year to give Barney Dunne his second senior medal. A third championship medal was won by Barney and his team-mates when Athy defeated Sarsfield in the 1937 final played in Naas on 17th July, 1938.
Athy suffered defeat in the 1941 senior championship final against Carbery but by then Barney Dunne was working in Dublin from where he was to return in time to play in the 1942 championship which ended with the Athy Club winning its fourth senior final in nine years. Barney also won two Leinster Leader Cup medals in 1937 and 1942 and played inter-county football for Kildare, winning a Leinster medal in 1935. He was a sub on the all-Ireland losing team of that year when Cavan unexpectedly defeated the hot favourites Kildare.
Barney retired from football in 1945 and was later a committee member of the Club and for a short period its joint Hon. Secretary with the legendary footballer, the later Tommy Mulhall. Barney is one of our last links with Athy’s great footballing years of the 1930’s and holds the unique record of four Senior Championship medals, a record which is unlikely to be bettered.
Congratulations to Tim and Barney on receiving the recent Club Award and to both of them goes our appreciation for years of dedicated service to Gaelic games in Athy.
Seamus Malone’s importance to Gaelic football in Athy was his part in establishing a minor club known as “The Young Emmets Gaelic Football Club” which catered for under-18 footballers, there being insufficient Senior players left in Athy at that stage. The Young Emmets rented a playing field from the South Kildare Agricultural Society and this was later to be purchased by the local club and developed as Geraldine Park. As the Young Emmet players grew in years the Club assumed senior status and was re-graded as such in 1921.
Over the years the Athy Club known at different times as Geraldine Football Club, The Young Emmets Gaelic Football Club and since December 1945 as Geraldine Hurling and Gaelic Football Club has been served by dedicated administrators. In the early years Seamus Malone and the J.A. Lawlor Town Clerk were to the forefront of the club’s affairs, while Bill Mahon of Sawyerswood served as Club Chairman from 1928 to 1945. Another whose name is synonymous with the GAA in Athy is Fintan Brennan, District Court Clerk and one-time Chairman of the Leinster Council. John W. Kehoe, Publican of Offaly Street, Joe Murphy, Railway company employee of Offaly Street and Andy Smith, Publican of Leinster Street were other long-serving members of the GAA Club in Athy. There are many others who made a major contribution to Gaelic football in the town, many of whom are now dead and in many cases forgotten by the present generation.
A couple of Sundays past the current members of Athy Gaelic Football Club came together to pay a tribute to two members of the Club who between them have 134 years of involvement with Gaelic football in Athy. Both of the men have many things in common. Neither are from the town of Athy or even from the County of Kildare. One is from Baileboro, Co. Cavan, the other from Tullamore near Listowel in Co. Kerry. Both Tim O’Sullivan and Barney Dunne have served the Athy Gaelic Football Club as players, Committee Members and as Club Secretaries in the past.
Tim O’Sullivan first came to Athy in the week before Christmas 1937 to work as a Chemist’s assistant with J.J. Collins in Duke Street. As expected of somebody from the Kingdom he joined Athy Gaelic Football Club and togged out on a few occasions but without much success. Tim played junior football for Athy for several years and was a sub on the senior team when it played the first round of the 1942 championship. Unfortunately when Athy won that championship in a replay against Carbery later in the year Tim was not on the panel. His forte was on the administrative side of club affairs and he served as a committee member for some years from 1945 and in 1953 was appointed Club Secretary. He held that position for the following four years which were lean years for the club both in terms of finance and success on the football field. This was nothing new for the Athy Gaelic Football Club as borne out by a reference in the Club minutes of January 1946 when the then Club Secretary reported that he had managed to buy a football cover and then went on to report to his fellow committee members “that there was every chance of getting a bladder”. Tim was appointed to the Geraldine Park Grounds Committee in or about 1951 and served as Chairman of that Committee from 1961-1963. He is currently the President of Athy Gaelic Football Club and is justifiably proud of the fact that he has attended every Annual General Meeting of Athy Gaelic Football Club since 1938.
Barney Dunne came to Athy from Baileboro in County Cavan in November 1931 to work as a barman in Mrs. Margaret O’Meara’s pub in Leinster Street. Bar Manager there at the time was the earlier-mentioned Andy Smith, another Co. Cavan man who was later to open up his own public house in Leinster Street. As a fit and big young man from the footballing county of Cavan Barney was a great acquisition for the local Club and he was soon togging out for Athy alongside the legendary Paul Matthews, the Ardee County Louth man who came to Athy in 1925.
Barney was a member of the first Athy team to win a senior championship in 1933 when Athy defeated Rathdangan by 2-6 to 1-4. That first success was achieved after Athy’s senior teams had been defeated in three previous county finals, 1923, 1926 and 1927. The 1933 victory was followed by a second championship win the following year to give Barney Dunne his second senior medal. A third championship medal was won by Barney and his team-mates when Athy defeated Sarsfield in the 1937 final played in Naas on 17th July, 1938.
Athy suffered defeat in the 1941 senior championship final against Carbery but by then Barney Dunne was working in Dublin from where he was to return in time to play in the 1942 championship which ended with the Athy Club winning its fourth senior final in nine years. Barney also won two Leinster Leader Cup medals in 1937 and 1942 and played inter-county football for Kildare, winning a Leinster medal in 1935. He was a sub on the all-Ireland losing team of that year when Cavan unexpectedly defeated the hot favourites Kildare.
Barney retired from football in 1945 and was later a committee member of the Club and for a short period its joint Hon. Secretary with the legendary footballer, the later Tommy Mulhall. Barney is one of our last links with Athy’s great footballing years of the 1930’s and holds the unique record of four Senior Championship medals, a record which is unlikely to be bettered.
Congratulations to Tim and Barney on receiving the recent Club Award and to both of them goes our appreciation for years of dedicated service to Gaelic games in Athy.
Thursday, March 1, 2001
Athy G.F.C.
Twelve years ago I interviewed Tom Forrestal of Castledermot who at 92 years of age was then the sole surviving member of Athy’s Senior Football team which lost the 1923 County Final to Naas. That final, played in Newbridge on 4th May 1924, was the first contested by an Athy team and resulted in a victory for Naas on the score of 2-5 to 0-0. The scoreline probably justified the report of a local newspaper which noted :- “The performance of the Athy Jazz Band which paraded in fancy dress before the match was more memorable than that of the injury hit Athy football team”.
Tom Forrestal was one of two Castledermot men on that team, the other being Paddy Hayden. Also players with Athy were Rheban brothers Tom and John Moore, while the “townies” included Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill, Chris Lawler, Dan “Comprey” Nolan, Jim Clancy, “Little” Johnny Kelly, Pat Brogan, Tom “Golly” Germaine, George Dowling, Mick Grant, Mick Mahon and Mick Byrne.
The Senior team of 1923 was not the first of Athy’s footballing heroes. That honour went to the Athy Junior Football team which won the 1907 final when it was re-played on 14th February, 1909. The Junior Cup was the first piece of silverware won by the Athy Gaelic Football Club but even in victory the junior players were to be disappointed when told that the County Board finances did not extend to the purchase of medals. That omission was finally corrected in 1927 when the Kildare County Board gave the outstanding medals to the Athy Club. They were later presented to the members of the 1907 final team at a function in the Urban District Council Offices in the local Town Hall. The team captain, John Lawler of St. Martin’s Terrace, was the first to receive his medal and he was then followed by those of his team mates who had survived the Great War, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Robert McWilliams was not there. He had enlisted in the Leinster Regiment during World War I and was killed in action in France on 9th September, 1916. Jim May had died as a result of a fall from a roof and his eight year old son Tom received his medal. Christy Farrell was also dead, while Mick Gibbons had emigrated to America. Mick “Major” Toomey stepped forward to receive his medal and was visibly affected by the occasion. Everyone in the room that night could not but be moved by the sight of the man who since his days of glory on the football field had lost a leg in a World War I battlefield. Now he walked with the aid of two wooden crutches.
I have attempted for years to positively identify the members of that successful 1907 Athy Junior Team and while I have collected the following names I cannot be confident that the list is accurate. Maybe my readers can help in confirming the composition of Athy’s first successful Gaelic football team from the names which I have noted as Ned Harkins, Jim May, John Lawler, Ned Lawler, Jack Kelly, Michael Malone, Christy Walsh, Dan Harkins, Mick Gibbons, Jim McArdle, Willie Mahon, Mert Hayden, Christy Farrell, Robert McWilliams and Mick Toomey.
Another presentation was made on a Friday night in October 1927 when Athy Gaelic Football Club members gathered to honour a prominent club member who was emigrating to America the following day. Mick Mahon was an outstanding minor footballer who had few equals on the field of play. He progressed to the senior team and played for Athy when it lost the 1923 senior championship final. He also played on the losing Athy team in the 1926 senior final and just a week before he emigrated to America he again featured on the Athy team which lost the 1927 senior final to Kildare town. Mick Mahon later played for New York and with him on that team was another former Athy player Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill. Mahon subsequently returned to Ireland and played for the senior county team, winning a Leinster final medal in 1931. It has been suggested that he was the first Athy club player to win an All-Ireland medal, but I have been unable as yet to confirm that fact.
Emigration took a heavy toll on Athy Gaelic football teams during the 1920’s and apart from Mick Mahon and Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill, other fine players to emigrate included Paddy Farrell, Myra Grant, George Dowling, Tom Blanchfield and Frank Lambe. I recall the late Ned Cranny recounting the “send off” given to Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill and Myra Grant in 1924 as they started the long journey to America. Eddie and Myra were star players for the local club and as they set out from home hundreds of local people turned out to wish them well as they paraded behind the local band which played them to the railway station. Eddie O’Neill would later return to Ireland but Myra Grant I understand lived out the rest of his life in America. Another former club player who never returned to Ireland was Frank Lambe whom I believe emigrated in 1923. Last week his daughter Anna Marie Lynch from New York called on me with her son Sean and daughter Colleen to check on her late father’s family. With her she brought an old silver medal which had been her father’s treasured possession . On the reverse side of the medal was an inscription “Senior Tournament Athy G.F.C. Frank Lambe”. This was a medal won by Frank as a member of Athy senior team in a club tournament held before 1923. It was the oldest local GAA medal I have yet seen and I had the pleasure of showing it at a recent club presentation to the two oldest members of Athy Gaelic Football Club.
More about those two men, one a remarkably successful Club player, the other a Club administrator for over 60 years in next weeks Eye on the Past. Incidentally I would like to hear from anyone who can give me background information on Frank Lambe and his family.
Tom Forrestal was one of two Castledermot men on that team, the other being Paddy Hayden. Also players with Athy were Rheban brothers Tom and John Moore, while the “townies” included Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill, Chris Lawler, Dan “Comprey” Nolan, Jim Clancy, “Little” Johnny Kelly, Pat Brogan, Tom “Golly” Germaine, George Dowling, Mick Grant, Mick Mahon and Mick Byrne.
The Senior team of 1923 was not the first of Athy’s footballing heroes. That honour went to the Athy Junior Football team which won the 1907 final when it was re-played on 14th February, 1909. The Junior Cup was the first piece of silverware won by the Athy Gaelic Football Club but even in victory the junior players were to be disappointed when told that the County Board finances did not extend to the purchase of medals. That omission was finally corrected in 1927 when the Kildare County Board gave the outstanding medals to the Athy Club. They were later presented to the members of the 1907 final team at a function in the Urban District Council Offices in the local Town Hall. The team captain, John Lawler of St. Martin’s Terrace, was the first to receive his medal and he was then followed by those of his team mates who had survived the Great War, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Robert McWilliams was not there. He had enlisted in the Leinster Regiment during World War I and was killed in action in France on 9th September, 1916. Jim May had died as a result of a fall from a roof and his eight year old son Tom received his medal. Christy Farrell was also dead, while Mick Gibbons had emigrated to America. Mick “Major” Toomey stepped forward to receive his medal and was visibly affected by the occasion. Everyone in the room that night could not but be moved by the sight of the man who since his days of glory on the football field had lost a leg in a World War I battlefield. Now he walked with the aid of two wooden crutches.
I have attempted for years to positively identify the members of that successful 1907 Athy Junior Team and while I have collected the following names I cannot be confident that the list is accurate. Maybe my readers can help in confirming the composition of Athy’s first successful Gaelic football team from the names which I have noted as Ned Harkins, Jim May, John Lawler, Ned Lawler, Jack Kelly, Michael Malone, Christy Walsh, Dan Harkins, Mick Gibbons, Jim McArdle, Willie Mahon, Mert Hayden, Christy Farrell, Robert McWilliams and Mick Toomey.
Another presentation was made on a Friday night in October 1927 when Athy Gaelic Football Club members gathered to honour a prominent club member who was emigrating to America the following day. Mick Mahon was an outstanding minor footballer who had few equals on the field of play. He progressed to the senior team and played for Athy when it lost the 1923 senior championship final. He also played on the losing Athy team in the 1926 senior final and just a week before he emigrated to America he again featured on the Athy team which lost the 1927 senior final to Kildare town. Mick Mahon later played for New York and with him on that team was another former Athy player Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill. Mahon subsequently returned to Ireland and played for the senior county team, winning a Leinster final medal in 1931. It has been suggested that he was the first Athy club player to win an All-Ireland medal, but I have been unable as yet to confirm that fact.
Emigration took a heavy toll on Athy Gaelic football teams during the 1920’s and apart from Mick Mahon and Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill, other fine players to emigrate included Paddy Farrell, Myra Grant, George Dowling, Tom Blanchfield and Frank Lambe. I recall the late Ned Cranny recounting the “send off” given to Eddie “Sapper” O’Neill and Myra Grant in 1924 as they started the long journey to America. Eddie and Myra were star players for the local club and as they set out from home hundreds of local people turned out to wish them well as they paraded behind the local band which played them to the railway station. Eddie O’Neill would later return to Ireland but Myra Grant I understand lived out the rest of his life in America. Another former club player who never returned to Ireland was Frank Lambe whom I believe emigrated in 1923. Last week his daughter Anna Marie Lynch from New York called on me with her son Sean and daughter Colleen to check on her late father’s family. With her she brought an old silver medal which had been her father’s treasured possession . On the reverse side of the medal was an inscription “Senior Tournament Athy G.F.C. Frank Lambe”. This was a medal won by Frank as a member of Athy senior team in a club tournament held before 1923. It was the oldest local GAA medal I have yet seen and I had the pleasure of showing it at a recent club presentation to the two oldest members of Athy Gaelic Football Club.
More about those two men, one a remarkably successful Club player, the other a Club administrator for over 60 years in next weeks Eye on the Past. Incidentally I would like to hear from anyone who can give me background information on Frank Lambe and his family.
Thursday, February 22, 2001
Athy in Fiction
“It’s not on any map, true places never are…”, was the claim made in Moby Dick. A historian should disagree, but even the historian knows that the history he traces is to some extent a work of the imagination. Dates and facts only provide the contours of the historical map; to evoke the past the historian generally has to trespass on the territory of fiction, so this week I’ll pay it my dues. In this Eye on the Past, historians’ stories make way for the rival images of poets and novelists (and even a stray photographer).
A diary is not quite fiction and not quite history, so it provides a convenient enough beginning. The first approach to any place is through the eye of the outsider, so we can take Chevalier de Latocnaye’s account of his visit to Athy in 1796 as a first impression of the town.
“I went to Athy, from whence every day there is a service of public boats to Dublin. At the entrance to the village I was stopped by four or five persons who asked for charity - they explained that it was to be used to give decent burial to a poor wretch who had died of hunger. I replied that since he was dead he wanted nothing. This answer did not appear to satisfy them, and so I contributed to the funereal pomp, the occasion being, perhaps, the only one in which the poor fellow’s friends were interested in his concerns.”
Brewer, passing through Athy on his travels around Ireland in 1825 described Athy :-
“Athy, although now decayed, was formerly a place of considerable importance. Its declining state is lamentably contrasted with local circumstances peculiarly favourable to its prosperity. The surrounding country is well adapted to tillage. The Grand Canal, and great southern road to Cork, connect it with the metropolis; and the river Barrow, on which it is seated, is navigable to the opulent trading port of Waterford. These advantages, however, have proved insufficient to retard the decay of a town, unquestionably of high reputation at an early period of national history.”
These passing glances provide a unique approach to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland, one which is particularly appropriate since the travel journal was characteristic of Irish literature of this time. An unsettled partner to imperial Britain, Ireland offered a strange, and sometimes disturbing, aspect to the English traveller, who presented it in his writing (if in sympathetic mood) as an exotic, tragic country. However, the numerous London publications advertised as ‘travels in Ireland’ were only one consequence of a habit of looking at Ireland as an unfamiliar and somehow unknowable place. Even Irish novelists, largely reliant on London publishers and an English readership, presented the places and the people most familiar to them as they would to a stranger – footnotes included. The ‘true places’ they represented in their fiction were not validated as such by sparking recognition or sympathy in the reader, but because the author insisted on their basis in fact, and typically overloaded the novel of the time with footnotes and explanations of local custom. ‘True places’ they may have aspired to present, but they provided a map and a key.
And then, to skip a bit further into the future, there came this: “Why is Kildare like the leg of a man’s trousers? Because it’s got Athy in it.” Maybe not the most auspicious debut in twentieth-century fiction, but having thrown this squib into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce ensured the immortality of a Kildare town whose unpronouncability would prevent generations of American undergraduates from ever getting the joke. However, if it seems that Athy has degenerated from a place to be travelled through into a bad pun, its next most famous appearance in Irish literature should redress the balance. Patrick Kavanagh’s poem Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin, bequeathed both a ‘canal-bank seat for the passer-by’, which sits on the bank of the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge, and these lines:
A swan swims by, head low, with many apologies
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns, mythologies.
And so Athy is once more a place, and not only a place of fact, but a bringer of mythologies. It may have seemed remote to Kavanagh as he sat by the Grand Canal in Dublin, but Athy was hardly ‘far-flung’. Nevertheless, if Kavanagh could imagine such familiar country as mythological territory, then perhaps other writers could find the ‘true places’ of the imagination by turning back to the familiarity of things known at first-hand.
Having skirted around Athy with the outsider, one writer appears who knows the town and its hinterland as an insider. John MacKenna’s fiction owes some debt to Kavanagh’s fondness for the familiar - with the exception of his novel Clare, he has never stepped outside the environs of Kildare. Readers of his books encounter a litany of local place-names, and anyone who knows Castledermot, or Kilkea, or Offaly Street can find their own perceptions of these places, the histories and associations which have gathered in their own mind, displaced by his fictional reality. And yet the invasion can hardly be resented because the stories which replace them (however momentarily) do not seem out of place. Instead, they can have an uncanny resonance – centring on personal, private events rather than the clash and clamour that is more often taken as the stuff of history, these stories are documents of their own kind.
Which brings me to my final link, and the one that’s closest to factual history – the documentary photograph. On publication of John Minihan’s collection of photographs of Athy, Shadows from the Pale, many Athy people revisited old scenes and old faces in John’s photographs, and a selection of these, taken over a period of thirty years, hangs in the town library. I wonder though, how many see the Athy they know reflected in his collection, because the strangest of truisms is that the places most familiar to us can at times seem equally as foreign. The series of photographs documenting the wake of Katie Tyrell most obviously highlights an aspect of life in the town that is long gone, but in any case it is difficult to look at these photographs with an insider’s eye and not feel, if only for a moment, slightly estranged by them. Perhaps the impression is created by looking at the landscape of the town only slightly altered from its present state, so that a quick glance can trick the onlooker into taking a thirty-year old shot as a recent photograph. Or perhaps an assumed familiarity is disturbed by a view of the place that’s undeniably exact, but still almost imperceptibly (if inevitably) foreign to a personal impression.
However, the different images of a local place that a novelist, or a photographer, or a diarist produce can only take their power from the way they interact with our own imagined places. To find a place that’s not on any map is not usually within the historian’s remit, but now and again it’s these imagined places that yield the truer sense of history.
A diary is not quite fiction and not quite history, so it provides a convenient enough beginning. The first approach to any place is through the eye of the outsider, so we can take Chevalier de Latocnaye’s account of his visit to Athy in 1796 as a first impression of the town.
“I went to Athy, from whence every day there is a service of public boats to Dublin. At the entrance to the village I was stopped by four or five persons who asked for charity - they explained that it was to be used to give decent burial to a poor wretch who had died of hunger. I replied that since he was dead he wanted nothing. This answer did not appear to satisfy them, and so I contributed to the funereal pomp, the occasion being, perhaps, the only one in which the poor fellow’s friends were interested in his concerns.”
Brewer, passing through Athy on his travels around Ireland in 1825 described Athy :-
“Athy, although now decayed, was formerly a place of considerable importance. Its declining state is lamentably contrasted with local circumstances peculiarly favourable to its prosperity. The surrounding country is well adapted to tillage. The Grand Canal, and great southern road to Cork, connect it with the metropolis; and the river Barrow, on which it is seated, is navigable to the opulent trading port of Waterford. These advantages, however, have proved insufficient to retard the decay of a town, unquestionably of high reputation at an early period of national history.”
These passing glances provide a unique approach to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland, one which is particularly appropriate since the travel journal was characteristic of Irish literature of this time. An unsettled partner to imperial Britain, Ireland offered a strange, and sometimes disturbing, aspect to the English traveller, who presented it in his writing (if in sympathetic mood) as an exotic, tragic country. However, the numerous London publications advertised as ‘travels in Ireland’ were only one consequence of a habit of looking at Ireland as an unfamiliar and somehow unknowable place. Even Irish novelists, largely reliant on London publishers and an English readership, presented the places and the people most familiar to them as they would to a stranger – footnotes included. The ‘true places’ they represented in their fiction were not validated as such by sparking recognition or sympathy in the reader, but because the author insisted on their basis in fact, and typically overloaded the novel of the time with footnotes and explanations of local custom. ‘True places’ they may have aspired to present, but they provided a map and a key.
And then, to skip a bit further into the future, there came this: “Why is Kildare like the leg of a man’s trousers? Because it’s got Athy in it.” Maybe not the most auspicious debut in twentieth-century fiction, but having thrown this squib into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce ensured the immortality of a Kildare town whose unpronouncability would prevent generations of American undergraduates from ever getting the joke. However, if it seems that Athy has degenerated from a place to be travelled through into a bad pun, its next most famous appearance in Irish literature should redress the balance. Patrick Kavanagh’s poem Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin, bequeathed both a ‘canal-bank seat for the passer-by’, which sits on the bank of the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge, and these lines:
A swan swims by, head low, with many apologies
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns, mythologies.
And so Athy is once more a place, and not only a place of fact, but a bringer of mythologies. It may have seemed remote to Kavanagh as he sat by the Grand Canal in Dublin, but Athy was hardly ‘far-flung’. Nevertheless, if Kavanagh could imagine such familiar country as mythological territory, then perhaps other writers could find the ‘true places’ of the imagination by turning back to the familiarity of things known at first-hand.
Having skirted around Athy with the outsider, one writer appears who knows the town and its hinterland as an insider. John MacKenna’s fiction owes some debt to Kavanagh’s fondness for the familiar - with the exception of his novel Clare, he has never stepped outside the environs of Kildare. Readers of his books encounter a litany of local place-names, and anyone who knows Castledermot, or Kilkea, or Offaly Street can find their own perceptions of these places, the histories and associations which have gathered in their own mind, displaced by his fictional reality. And yet the invasion can hardly be resented because the stories which replace them (however momentarily) do not seem out of place. Instead, they can have an uncanny resonance – centring on personal, private events rather than the clash and clamour that is more often taken as the stuff of history, these stories are documents of their own kind.
Which brings me to my final link, and the one that’s closest to factual history – the documentary photograph. On publication of John Minihan’s collection of photographs of Athy, Shadows from the Pale, many Athy people revisited old scenes and old faces in John’s photographs, and a selection of these, taken over a period of thirty years, hangs in the town library. I wonder though, how many see the Athy they know reflected in his collection, because the strangest of truisms is that the places most familiar to us can at times seem equally as foreign. The series of photographs documenting the wake of Katie Tyrell most obviously highlights an aspect of life in the town that is long gone, but in any case it is difficult to look at these photographs with an insider’s eye and not feel, if only for a moment, slightly estranged by them. Perhaps the impression is created by looking at the landscape of the town only slightly altered from its present state, so that a quick glance can trick the onlooker into taking a thirty-year old shot as a recent photograph. Or perhaps an assumed familiarity is disturbed by a view of the place that’s undeniably exact, but still almost imperceptibly (if inevitably) foreign to a personal impression.
However, the different images of a local place that a novelist, or a photographer, or a diarist produce can only take their power from the way they interact with our own imagined places. To find a place that’s not on any map is not usually within the historian’s remit, but now and again it’s these imagined places that yield the truer sense of history.
Gertie Gray
If you are a regular reader of this column you will know that Offaly Street and the families who lived there hold a special place in my memories which stretch back into the hazy 1940’s and the better remembered decade which followed. I still recall the families that lived in our street but with each passing year the jigsaw of memory loses yet another piece.
Last week another link with Offaly Street was lost with the passing of Gertie Gray of Pairc Bhride. Gertie was the daughter of Tom and May McHugh who lived at No. 8 Offaly Street. I understand that Tom and his brother Matt were originally from Co. Donegal and came to Athy via Abbeyleix where they worked in a local foundry. The McHugh brothers established two foundries in Athy, Matt opening his in Meeting Lane while Tom set up his business in Janeville Lane at the back of Offaly Street.
Tom and his family lived for a few years in Butlers Row before moving into No. 8 Offaly Street sometime in the late 1930’s where their landlord was Myles Whelan of Fortbarrington. The hardships and health hazards of those days were reflected in the high mortality rate which Irish towns including Athy experienced before and after the Second World War. There were few families in Offaly Street which did not experience the loss of a young child or even an adult son or daughter during that period and Tom and May McHugh suffered two bereavements in a short space of time. Their daughter Annie died aged 26 years in September 1938 and in May 1940 their eldest son John who was married to Molly O’Rourke died at 30 years of age. They were survived by six siblings, including Gertie who died last week. The eldest daughter May was later to marry Tommy Whelan of Levitstown and they lived in St. Patrick’s Avenue up to 1960 when the entire Whelan family emigrated to England. At Gertie’s funeral last week I met her nephew Oliver Whelan who now operates a successful foundry business in Luton, as did his Grand-father Tom in Janeville Lane so many years ago.
Another daughter Barbara McHugh married Bill Tobin and they lived in Ballylinan where tragically Barbara died in childbirth. Bill who had previously returned from America before marrying Barbara or “Babs” as she was known later returned to New York where I believe he has since died. Following the death of his brother John, Tommy McHugh was the oldest surviving son of the McHugh family and it was Tommy in whom his father Tom invested his hopes for the future. Tommy was a skilled foundry man whose first job was with his father Tom in the Janeville Lane foundry. There he worked with local men such as Mannix Thompson and Des Donaldson, both of whom would later join the I.V.I. Foundry in Leinster Street. Coincidentally Des’s sister Maureen who married John J. Cardiff was buried this week, and many of you will remember his brother Sidney Donaldson who was tragically killed many years ago while attending a car race in the Curragh. Tommy McHugh later took up a position with the newly-opened IVI factory where he was Paddy Timpson’s pre-decessor and where like Paddy he was an extremely important part of the local foundry team. Tommy subsequently left Athy and opened a foundry in Pollerton Road, Carlow from where his mother May originally came and in the latter years of his life he was the manager of the Unidare Foundry in Finglas, Dublin.
The only surviving member today of Tom and May McHugh’s family is their son Matt whom I had the privilege of meeting when he attended his sister Gertie’s funeral. Matt who left Athy in 1942 travelled from Harrow in London where he is now living in retirement. He is still remembered after all those years and both Denis Smyth and Jimmy Kelly who lived in Offaly Street recalled Matt by his nickname of 60 years ago. In a town where everyone has a nickname Matt was known as “Scatcha”, a name without any provenance or apparent meaning, but a name which confirmed that Matt belonged to a close-knit community where affection was evidenced in the language of the ordinary people. He was just sixteen years of age when he left wartime Athy to join the RAF in Belfast and he was 17 years old when he married Cecilia Maher of Clonmel. He spent 7 years in the RAF, serving in India and elsewhere, and he last worked as a chauffeur for the Wimpy Group in England. When he left Athy 59 years ago Matt left behind in the family home in Offaly Street two younger sisters, Gertie and Una. Una later emigrated to England where she married and lived in Sheffield until she died.
Gertie was the only member of Tom and May McHugh’s family to live out her life in Athy where she played an active part in the Parish Choir, the local ICA Guild and the Musical Society. She is survived by her husband Eamonn and family to whom our sympathy is extended.
The McHugh Foundries of Janeville Lane and Meeting Lane flourished at a time when foundry work was an important industry in Athy. The IVI Foundry established by Captain Hosie was the largest foundry in its day, but much needed employment was to be found also at Bergins Foundry and also that operated by Duthie Larges. The local St. Michael’s Cemetery has many examples of the skillful work of the Athy Foundries of the past and amongst them can be found the metal crosses which came from the Janeville Lane Foundry of Tom McHugh.
Time has moved on. Tom McHugh’s foundry is no more and its site will soon form part of a car park for the hotel planned on the site of the 13th century Dominican Friary.
Last week another link with Offaly Street was lost with the passing of Gertie Gray of Pairc Bhride. Gertie was the daughter of Tom and May McHugh who lived at No. 8 Offaly Street. I understand that Tom and his brother Matt were originally from Co. Donegal and came to Athy via Abbeyleix where they worked in a local foundry. The McHugh brothers established two foundries in Athy, Matt opening his in Meeting Lane while Tom set up his business in Janeville Lane at the back of Offaly Street.
Tom and his family lived for a few years in Butlers Row before moving into No. 8 Offaly Street sometime in the late 1930’s where their landlord was Myles Whelan of Fortbarrington. The hardships and health hazards of those days were reflected in the high mortality rate which Irish towns including Athy experienced before and after the Second World War. There were few families in Offaly Street which did not experience the loss of a young child or even an adult son or daughter during that period and Tom and May McHugh suffered two bereavements in a short space of time. Their daughter Annie died aged 26 years in September 1938 and in May 1940 their eldest son John who was married to Molly O’Rourke died at 30 years of age. They were survived by six siblings, including Gertie who died last week. The eldest daughter May was later to marry Tommy Whelan of Levitstown and they lived in St. Patrick’s Avenue up to 1960 when the entire Whelan family emigrated to England. At Gertie’s funeral last week I met her nephew Oliver Whelan who now operates a successful foundry business in Luton, as did his Grand-father Tom in Janeville Lane so many years ago.
Another daughter Barbara McHugh married Bill Tobin and they lived in Ballylinan where tragically Barbara died in childbirth. Bill who had previously returned from America before marrying Barbara or “Babs” as she was known later returned to New York where I believe he has since died. Following the death of his brother John, Tommy McHugh was the oldest surviving son of the McHugh family and it was Tommy in whom his father Tom invested his hopes for the future. Tommy was a skilled foundry man whose first job was with his father Tom in the Janeville Lane foundry. There he worked with local men such as Mannix Thompson and Des Donaldson, both of whom would later join the I.V.I. Foundry in Leinster Street. Coincidentally Des’s sister Maureen who married John J. Cardiff was buried this week, and many of you will remember his brother Sidney Donaldson who was tragically killed many years ago while attending a car race in the Curragh. Tommy McHugh later took up a position with the newly-opened IVI factory where he was Paddy Timpson’s pre-decessor and where like Paddy he was an extremely important part of the local foundry team. Tommy subsequently left Athy and opened a foundry in Pollerton Road, Carlow from where his mother May originally came and in the latter years of his life he was the manager of the Unidare Foundry in Finglas, Dublin.
The only surviving member today of Tom and May McHugh’s family is their son Matt whom I had the privilege of meeting when he attended his sister Gertie’s funeral. Matt who left Athy in 1942 travelled from Harrow in London where he is now living in retirement. He is still remembered after all those years and both Denis Smyth and Jimmy Kelly who lived in Offaly Street recalled Matt by his nickname of 60 years ago. In a town where everyone has a nickname Matt was known as “Scatcha”, a name without any provenance or apparent meaning, but a name which confirmed that Matt belonged to a close-knit community where affection was evidenced in the language of the ordinary people. He was just sixteen years of age when he left wartime Athy to join the RAF in Belfast and he was 17 years old when he married Cecilia Maher of Clonmel. He spent 7 years in the RAF, serving in India and elsewhere, and he last worked as a chauffeur for the Wimpy Group in England. When he left Athy 59 years ago Matt left behind in the family home in Offaly Street two younger sisters, Gertie and Una. Una later emigrated to England where she married and lived in Sheffield until she died.
Gertie was the only member of Tom and May McHugh’s family to live out her life in Athy where she played an active part in the Parish Choir, the local ICA Guild and the Musical Society. She is survived by her husband Eamonn and family to whom our sympathy is extended.
The McHugh Foundries of Janeville Lane and Meeting Lane flourished at a time when foundry work was an important industry in Athy. The IVI Foundry established by Captain Hosie was the largest foundry in its day, but much needed employment was to be found also at Bergins Foundry and also that operated by Duthie Larges. The local St. Michael’s Cemetery has many examples of the skillful work of the Athy Foundries of the past and amongst them can be found the metal crosses which came from the Janeville Lane Foundry of Tom McHugh.
Time has moved on. Tom McHugh’s foundry is no more and its site will soon form part of a car park for the hotel planned on the site of the 13th century Dominican Friary.
Thursday, February 8, 2001
Jenny Hegarty
“We’ll be excommunicated”. I spoke in jest to my fellow Christian and former neighbour Ricky Kelly as we both exited from St. Michael’s Church at the top of Offaly Street. “Weren’t we terrible eejits to live for so long under the half baked notion that attending a Protestant neighbours funeral would lead to eternal damnation.” There was nothing further to say. We walked on in silence, not giving voice to the collective shame which once marked Irish country lives separated by religious differences of an obscure and doubtful origin. The occasion was the Sunday afternoon funeral of Jenny Hegarty who died at 84 years of age after spending the last 69 years of her life in Athy.
“Miss Hegarty” is how she was known to the hundreds, nay, the thousands of customers she served while in charge of the wool and haberdashery department in Shaws of Duke Street. My mother who herself came to Athy in 1945 did all her shopping in Shaws and Miss Hegarty was a name I came to recognise when as a young lad I was dispatched to return some item or other to Shaws store. For you see my mother was of the old style of shopper who prodded, tested and tried every individual article on sale before parting with her hard earned money.
The wool and haberdashery department was perhaps the most visited department of Shaws store during the 1940’s and 1950’s and for a very good reason. Almost every Irish housewife knitted, sewed and darned. Pullovers, stockings and gloves were the mainstay of the hand knitter whose requirements were always attended to by Miss Hegarty. Do you remember the winter nights spent in winding balls of wool from the hanks in which they were sold in the shops. I hated that boring job of holding the hanks of wool between my outstretched arms while my mother patiently and with a dexterity born of years of experience, calmly wound the balls of wool. That same wool would soon find a shape and a purpose between the knitting needles which were taken out each night after tea plates and cups had been washed and put away. Miss Hegarty was the acknowledged wool expert who helped and advised the vast array of females for whom knitting was a pastime or in many cases, as with my own mother, a necessary form of self help sofar as the family finances were concerned. Jenny was her name, a fact of which I was not aware until her Death Notice appeared in the newspaper. Indeed I am sure many of those same people she had served so well over the years were also unaware of her first name for to all and sundry she was simply “Miss Hegarty”.
She came to Athy in 1932 soon after she left school to take up a position with Sam Shaw in Duke Street. A native of Portarlington she had one brother, Harry Hegarty, who many of my readers will remember as a rural postman serving the Wolfhill area. Harry died 22 years ago and at the time lived, as did Jenny, at 3 Duke Street which is now the offices of the Irish Permanent Building Society. When Jenny first came to Athy she lived in with the other lady assistants in the living quarters attached to Shaws store. Some of the other girls who in their younger days worked in Shaws with Jenny included Etta Eacrett, Anna Breakey, Frances Dobson, Ann Cole, Florrie Bass, Muriel Lazenbey and Miss Leggett. Jenny spent 51 years in the wool and haberdashery department of Shaws and throughout much of that time she was the staff member who trained every new assistant who joined the Duke Street store. It was to Jenny’s counter that the new arrivals were invariably directed on their first day for it was her experience and kind manner which provided the perfect qualifications for passing on to each newcomer the Shaw ethos of sales and service.
Jenny retired almost 18 years ago, all the time living with her brother’s family at No. 3 Duke Street and moving with them in 1993 to Burtown. To everyone who knew her, whether as Miss Hegarty or Jenny, she was the consummate lady, always courteous, always helpful and in her own way an institution in the town where she had lived since 1932. The Sunday afternoon funeral in St. Michael’s was attended by persons representative of the different religious creeds in the town. It was fitting that it was so, for after all Miss Hegarty was known to so many and was liked by everyone she came in contact with during her many years in Athy. May she rest in peace.
Recalling the part played by Shaws in bringing so many young girls to Athy over the decades it strikes me that here is a fruitful field of study for some urban sociologist. Just imagine what the Shaws employment practice meant to the local Protestant Churches in terms of renewal. Many of the girls who joined the firm later married locally at a time when the Ne Temere Decree was still a prohibitive presence in Irish life. However that’s a matter for research for another day, and perhaps by someone other than the present writer.
I got several phone calls following last weeks article with particular reference to Gilbert Carey. Many thanks to all who contacted me. I now have more than sufficient information to pass on to my enquirer from Manchester. However, I need your assistance in relation to another matter. Kevin Kerwin has written to me from Florida with regard to possible family connections in the South Kildare area. His great grand-father Daniel Kirwan, a blacksmith whose own father was James Kirwan of Duke Street, emigrated to America in 1843. Any information helpful to Mr. Kerwin’s enquiry can be passed on through me.
“Miss Hegarty” is how she was known to the hundreds, nay, the thousands of customers she served while in charge of the wool and haberdashery department in Shaws of Duke Street. My mother who herself came to Athy in 1945 did all her shopping in Shaws and Miss Hegarty was a name I came to recognise when as a young lad I was dispatched to return some item or other to Shaws store. For you see my mother was of the old style of shopper who prodded, tested and tried every individual article on sale before parting with her hard earned money.
The wool and haberdashery department was perhaps the most visited department of Shaws store during the 1940’s and 1950’s and for a very good reason. Almost every Irish housewife knitted, sewed and darned. Pullovers, stockings and gloves were the mainstay of the hand knitter whose requirements were always attended to by Miss Hegarty. Do you remember the winter nights spent in winding balls of wool from the hanks in which they were sold in the shops. I hated that boring job of holding the hanks of wool between my outstretched arms while my mother patiently and with a dexterity born of years of experience, calmly wound the balls of wool. That same wool would soon find a shape and a purpose between the knitting needles which were taken out each night after tea plates and cups had been washed and put away. Miss Hegarty was the acknowledged wool expert who helped and advised the vast array of females for whom knitting was a pastime or in many cases, as with my own mother, a necessary form of self help sofar as the family finances were concerned. Jenny was her name, a fact of which I was not aware until her Death Notice appeared in the newspaper. Indeed I am sure many of those same people she had served so well over the years were also unaware of her first name for to all and sundry she was simply “Miss Hegarty”.
She came to Athy in 1932 soon after she left school to take up a position with Sam Shaw in Duke Street. A native of Portarlington she had one brother, Harry Hegarty, who many of my readers will remember as a rural postman serving the Wolfhill area. Harry died 22 years ago and at the time lived, as did Jenny, at 3 Duke Street which is now the offices of the Irish Permanent Building Society. When Jenny first came to Athy she lived in with the other lady assistants in the living quarters attached to Shaws store. Some of the other girls who in their younger days worked in Shaws with Jenny included Etta Eacrett, Anna Breakey, Frances Dobson, Ann Cole, Florrie Bass, Muriel Lazenbey and Miss Leggett. Jenny spent 51 years in the wool and haberdashery department of Shaws and throughout much of that time she was the staff member who trained every new assistant who joined the Duke Street store. It was to Jenny’s counter that the new arrivals were invariably directed on their first day for it was her experience and kind manner which provided the perfect qualifications for passing on to each newcomer the Shaw ethos of sales and service.
Jenny retired almost 18 years ago, all the time living with her brother’s family at No. 3 Duke Street and moving with them in 1993 to Burtown. To everyone who knew her, whether as Miss Hegarty or Jenny, she was the consummate lady, always courteous, always helpful and in her own way an institution in the town where she had lived since 1932. The Sunday afternoon funeral in St. Michael’s was attended by persons representative of the different religious creeds in the town. It was fitting that it was so, for after all Miss Hegarty was known to so many and was liked by everyone she came in contact with during her many years in Athy. May she rest in peace.
Recalling the part played by Shaws in bringing so many young girls to Athy over the decades it strikes me that here is a fruitful field of study for some urban sociologist. Just imagine what the Shaws employment practice meant to the local Protestant Churches in terms of renewal. Many of the girls who joined the firm later married locally at a time when the Ne Temere Decree was still a prohibitive presence in Irish life. However that’s a matter for research for another day, and perhaps by someone other than the present writer.
I got several phone calls following last weeks article with particular reference to Gilbert Carey. Many thanks to all who contacted me. I now have more than sufficient information to pass on to my enquirer from Manchester. However, I need your assistance in relation to another matter. Kevin Kerwin has written to me from Florida with regard to possible family connections in the South Kildare area. His great grand-father Daniel Kirwan, a blacksmith whose own father was James Kirwan of Duke Street, emigrated to America in 1843. Any information helpful to Mr. Kerwin’s enquiry can be passed on through me.
Thursday, February 1, 2001
Bits and Pieces
Chris Corlett, an Archaeologist with Dúchas and recently appointed Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries Ireland gave a first class lecture to an appreciative audience in the Leinster Arms Hotel last Thursday night. His subject was “The Sacred Mountain” known to you and me as Croagh Patrick, located just a few miles away from Westport in County Mayo. He illustrated his presentation with slides and the resulting interesting insight into the legends and archaeology of St. Patrick’s Mountain was well received. Arranged under the auspices of South Kildare An Taisce and Athy Museum Society the lecture was the first in a series which will continue next month with a talk by the recently appointed Heritage Centre Manager, Margaret O’Riordan on the Holy Wells of Ireland.
One of the many interesting letters received by me since Christmas was from Bill Wheeler who lives in Mosely near Birmingham seeking information on a friend of his from Athy with whom he has lost contact. In 1943 Bill Wheeler and Gilbert Carey from Athy joined the British Royal Air Forces as 16 year old aircraft apprentices. They served together until July 1947 at RAF Halton and St. Athan after which they were sent to different units and lost contact with each other until 1951. That year Bill Wheeler was serving in Canada and received a letter from Gilbert which was posted in New York and had been sent to Bill via his own mother who was living in England. That’s the last Bill heard of his Athy friend Gilbert Carey. Bill had previously met Gilbert’s older sister Eileen who worked as a Nurse in a hospital in Totteridge in London, and an older brother Jim Carey who was also in the RAF. If any of my readers can give me any information as to Gilbert Carey or his family I will be pleased to pass it on to his old friend Bill Wheeler.
Writing of soldiers reminds me of a photograph which appeared in the Saturday Herald on 10th June, 1916. The accompanying text read “This is a photograph of Private Michael Bowden (Standing) and Private John Byrne taken at Limburg Lahn in Internment Camp, Germany. Private Bowden previous to the outbreak of the War was a local postman in Athy, Co. Kildare and Private Byrne was head gardener to Mr. Holland, Vetinerary Surgeon, Athy. They were taken prisoners early in 1914.”
I have often wondered what happened to Michael Bowden and John Byrne. Did they survive the War and if so did they return to their native Athy. Does anybody know what happened to them. I would be delighted to get further information on both of these men.
I received a telephone call from a reporter on an Irish Sunday newspaper a few days ago following up a reference in another local paper to my recent piece on the marriage of local girl Bridget Dowling with Alois Hitler, brother of the infamous Adolf Hitler. His interest in the little known association between South Kildare and the German führer was equaled only by my surprise on hearing a recent claim made to me that Auvril and Wilbur Wright, the World’s most famous aeronauts were grandsons of a man who had emigrated from South Kildare at the beginning of the 19th century. My good friend Richard Corrigan, an indefatigable genealogical researcher, was my informant but the evidence to support a County Kildare connection is still subject to verification. More about that again.
Last weeks news regarding the proposed new hotel on the Abbey site at the rear of Emily Square is most welcome. That area has seen many developments over the centuries stretching back to 1253 when the riverside site was the location of the very first Dominican Monastery in Athy. The Friars Preachers, as the Dominicans were known, were a Mendicant Order who survived on the charity of those amongst whom they lived and served. The Monastery of St. Dominic was a substantial complex of buildings and included at the time of the Reformation in the 1540’s a Church, a Bell tower, a chapter house, a dormitory, a large hall, three chambers, a kitchen, a cemetery, an orchard and a garden containing one acre. The Monastery also had ownership of two fishing weirs in the town, six cottages and ten acres of arable land.
The Monastery itself covered an area which ran from the Barrow River to the corner of the present Emily Row and from there up the present Offaly Street returning to the River Barrow via Janeville Lane which is at the side of St. Michael’s Church. The large building or rather two buildings which now occupy the original Dominican Monastery site probably conceal within their grounds the last remaining evidence of the 13th century monastic buildings. Before work commences on the building of the new hotel I hope that adequate time will be set aside to allow for a comprehensive archaeological examination of this ancient monastery site.
Watching the work on the footpath over the Crom-a-Boo bridge last week prompted me to marvel at the excellent bridge builders of the 18th century. Built a few years before the 1798 Rebellion and designed to carry horse-drawn carriages of that era the bridge still continues to carry traffic into it’s third century. But nowadays the traffic is heavy vehicular traffic which could not have been envisaged by those who planned and built the bridge over 200 years ago. Isn’t the strength and sturdiness of that ancient bridge a lasting monument to the foresight, design excellence and workmanship of the men who worked all of those years ago without the modern equipment and facilities available today.
Its near neighbour White’s Castle which has stood guard over that bridge and its predecessors on the River Barrow for almost 600 years is sadly showing that old age puts everyone and everything at risk. The fabric of the building has been deteriorating for some time and in particular what appears to be early 19th century additions in brick are a cause of considerable concern. Whites Castle on account of its location and historical associations is one of the more important buildings in Athy and one can only hope that either the Town Council or the Department of Arts and Culture will move to acquire Whites Castle and thereby ensure its future.
One of the many interesting letters received by me since Christmas was from Bill Wheeler who lives in Mosely near Birmingham seeking information on a friend of his from Athy with whom he has lost contact. In 1943 Bill Wheeler and Gilbert Carey from Athy joined the British Royal Air Forces as 16 year old aircraft apprentices. They served together until July 1947 at RAF Halton and St. Athan after which they were sent to different units and lost contact with each other until 1951. That year Bill Wheeler was serving in Canada and received a letter from Gilbert which was posted in New York and had been sent to Bill via his own mother who was living in England. That’s the last Bill heard of his Athy friend Gilbert Carey. Bill had previously met Gilbert’s older sister Eileen who worked as a Nurse in a hospital in Totteridge in London, and an older brother Jim Carey who was also in the RAF. If any of my readers can give me any information as to Gilbert Carey or his family I will be pleased to pass it on to his old friend Bill Wheeler.
Writing of soldiers reminds me of a photograph which appeared in the Saturday Herald on 10th June, 1916. The accompanying text read “This is a photograph of Private Michael Bowden (Standing) and Private John Byrne taken at Limburg Lahn in Internment Camp, Germany. Private Bowden previous to the outbreak of the War was a local postman in Athy, Co. Kildare and Private Byrne was head gardener to Mr. Holland, Vetinerary Surgeon, Athy. They were taken prisoners early in 1914.”
I have often wondered what happened to Michael Bowden and John Byrne. Did they survive the War and if so did they return to their native Athy. Does anybody know what happened to them. I would be delighted to get further information on both of these men.
I received a telephone call from a reporter on an Irish Sunday newspaper a few days ago following up a reference in another local paper to my recent piece on the marriage of local girl Bridget Dowling with Alois Hitler, brother of the infamous Adolf Hitler. His interest in the little known association between South Kildare and the German führer was equaled only by my surprise on hearing a recent claim made to me that Auvril and Wilbur Wright, the World’s most famous aeronauts were grandsons of a man who had emigrated from South Kildare at the beginning of the 19th century. My good friend Richard Corrigan, an indefatigable genealogical researcher, was my informant but the evidence to support a County Kildare connection is still subject to verification. More about that again.
Last weeks news regarding the proposed new hotel on the Abbey site at the rear of Emily Square is most welcome. That area has seen many developments over the centuries stretching back to 1253 when the riverside site was the location of the very first Dominican Monastery in Athy. The Friars Preachers, as the Dominicans were known, were a Mendicant Order who survived on the charity of those amongst whom they lived and served. The Monastery of St. Dominic was a substantial complex of buildings and included at the time of the Reformation in the 1540’s a Church, a Bell tower, a chapter house, a dormitory, a large hall, three chambers, a kitchen, a cemetery, an orchard and a garden containing one acre. The Monastery also had ownership of two fishing weirs in the town, six cottages and ten acres of arable land.
The Monastery itself covered an area which ran from the Barrow River to the corner of the present Emily Row and from there up the present Offaly Street returning to the River Barrow via Janeville Lane which is at the side of St. Michael’s Church. The large building or rather two buildings which now occupy the original Dominican Monastery site probably conceal within their grounds the last remaining evidence of the 13th century monastic buildings. Before work commences on the building of the new hotel I hope that adequate time will be set aside to allow for a comprehensive archaeological examination of this ancient monastery site.
Watching the work on the footpath over the Crom-a-Boo bridge last week prompted me to marvel at the excellent bridge builders of the 18th century. Built a few years before the 1798 Rebellion and designed to carry horse-drawn carriages of that era the bridge still continues to carry traffic into it’s third century. But nowadays the traffic is heavy vehicular traffic which could not have been envisaged by those who planned and built the bridge over 200 years ago. Isn’t the strength and sturdiness of that ancient bridge a lasting monument to the foresight, design excellence and workmanship of the men who worked all of those years ago without the modern equipment and facilities available today.
Its near neighbour White’s Castle which has stood guard over that bridge and its predecessors on the River Barrow for almost 600 years is sadly showing that old age puts everyone and everything at risk. The fabric of the building has been deteriorating for some time and in particular what appears to be early 19th century additions in brick are a cause of considerable concern. Whites Castle on account of its location and historical associations is one of the more important buildings in Athy and one can only hope that either the Town Council or the Department of Arts and Culture will move to acquire Whites Castle and thereby ensure its future.
Thursday, January 25, 2001
John Worthly (2)
When John Wortley moved to Lambe’s fruit farm at Bolton Hill, Moone in 1957 there were 55 acres under fruit. This was to increase under his management to 175 acres, and raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries, redcurrants and apples provided the basis for many full-time and part-time jobs during the economic hard times of those years. I remember the lorries which left Emily Square in the early hours of the summer mornings bringing the fruit pickers to Bolton Hill. But for my early morning duties as a Mass server I would not have expected to have shared such early hours with the good women and youngsters who clambered up on the lorries for the short journey to the fruit farm. During the six weeks of the fruit picking season which coincided with the school holidays, upwards of 500 young boys and girls were employed at the Bolton Hill Fruit Farm. “The youngsters were the best pickers” says John, while the older women from Athy, Carlow and Castledermot made up the majority of the full-time staff on the farm.
John recalls some of those wonderful hard-working women from forty years ago. Teresa Roycroft, Nellie Fennell and her sister Mrs. Casey, Mrs. Brennan, Lilly Moore, “Nonie” Kelly, Mrs. McFadden, Josie Burke and Maggie Robinson to mention but a few. They all gathered in the town square in time to catch the 7.30am lorry to Bolton Hill where they started work at 8.00am, finishing at 6.00pm in the evening. The O’Keeffe’s including Mick, John Joe, Eamon and Tony were the drivers employed by Lambes, both on and off the fruit farm. In his early years on the job John failed to understand the difficulties that can arise when county allegiances come to the fore. On one such occasion the Athy women and the women from Carlow came to blows. The occasion was marked by the use of sturdy wooden fruit boxes as weapons by both sides in a futile attempt to batter their opponents into submission. Peace was eventually restored and thereafter only guaranteed so long as the battling women were kept apart. This was achieved by judiciously allocating each group to pick fruit in different and well separated areas of the farm.
In the late 1950’s Lambe Brothers required more and more fruit for their jam- manufacturing process, and sought to extend strawberry growing into the south east of Ireland. John toured County Wexford with a local horticultural adviser on a strawberry-growing mission but got little or no co-operation from the local farmers. Only one Clonroche-based farmer took up the offer and his immediate success in growing strawberries soon encouraged many others to get involved, in time creating the phenomenal success story which is the current Wexford Strawberry industry.
Barleyhill Farm was originally owned by Johnny Moran who sold it to Lambe Brothers in or about 1942 and Johnny then took on the job of farm manager. He was replaced 12 years later by John Wortley. The other Lambe Fruit Farm at Fontstown was purchased around the same time from Mr. Goodwin [Snr.] and was managed by Alo Lawler and later still by his son Dermot.
John Wortley retired on the last day of 1977, moving with his family to the Fontstown Farm where they lived for two years in the mews house. From there he started his landscaping business which was to occupy him for the next twelve years. His first landscaping contract was with the Marine Hotel in Sutton Cross in Dublin where after six weeks work he found himself with a profit of only £6.00. It was for him a valuable if expensive lesson in costing and estimating, but a lesson he would never forget. The Wortley family moved to Oldcourt in 1980 where John built a house in a field purchased from local farmer Jimmy Livingstone. At that time John was involved in producing wood carvings which he is quick to point out are all hand carved and owe nothing to the lathe. He has been working in wood since the mid-1970’s, having earlier executed stone carvings when he worked and lived in the English Cotswolds.
John’s success as a wood carver has seen his work included in art exhibitions throughout the region. His reproductions in different types of wood of the Irish fauna is particularly striking, and is a big favourite with the many persons who over the years have acquired examples of John’s work. Now retired from landscaping and gardening, John, at 84 years of age continues to produce wood carvings, while indulging in his other hobby of breeding and showing prized poultry.
John whose parents were members of the Plymouth Brethern describes himself as a non-conformist. I was particularly interested to hear of his connection with the Plymouth Brethern founded by John Nelson Darby, a one time associate of Athy man Reverend Thomas Kelly of Kellyite fame. John’s un-prepossessing manner belies a wealth of experience on farms as far apart as Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and Greenstone Point in the west of the Scottish Highlands. The farmer cum artist has spent 47 years in south Kildare, more years than he spent in his native country and by his pleasant and gentlemanly manner has endeared himself to everyone fortunate enough to have met him over the years.
John recalls some of those wonderful hard-working women from forty years ago. Teresa Roycroft, Nellie Fennell and her sister Mrs. Casey, Mrs. Brennan, Lilly Moore, “Nonie” Kelly, Mrs. McFadden, Josie Burke and Maggie Robinson to mention but a few. They all gathered in the town square in time to catch the 7.30am lorry to Bolton Hill where they started work at 8.00am, finishing at 6.00pm in the evening. The O’Keeffe’s including Mick, John Joe, Eamon and Tony were the drivers employed by Lambes, both on and off the fruit farm. In his early years on the job John failed to understand the difficulties that can arise when county allegiances come to the fore. On one such occasion the Athy women and the women from Carlow came to blows. The occasion was marked by the use of sturdy wooden fruit boxes as weapons by both sides in a futile attempt to batter their opponents into submission. Peace was eventually restored and thereafter only guaranteed so long as the battling women were kept apart. This was achieved by judiciously allocating each group to pick fruit in different and well separated areas of the farm.
In the late 1950’s Lambe Brothers required more and more fruit for their jam- manufacturing process, and sought to extend strawberry growing into the south east of Ireland. John toured County Wexford with a local horticultural adviser on a strawberry-growing mission but got little or no co-operation from the local farmers. Only one Clonroche-based farmer took up the offer and his immediate success in growing strawberries soon encouraged many others to get involved, in time creating the phenomenal success story which is the current Wexford Strawberry industry.
Barleyhill Farm was originally owned by Johnny Moran who sold it to Lambe Brothers in or about 1942 and Johnny then took on the job of farm manager. He was replaced 12 years later by John Wortley. The other Lambe Fruit Farm at Fontstown was purchased around the same time from Mr. Goodwin [Snr.] and was managed by Alo Lawler and later still by his son Dermot.
John Wortley retired on the last day of 1977, moving with his family to the Fontstown Farm where they lived for two years in the mews house. From there he started his landscaping business which was to occupy him for the next twelve years. His first landscaping contract was with the Marine Hotel in Sutton Cross in Dublin where after six weeks work he found himself with a profit of only £6.00. It was for him a valuable if expensive lesson in costing and estimating, but a lesson he would never forget. The Wortley family moved to Oldcourt in 1980 where John built a house in a field purchased from local farmer Jimmy Livingstone. At that time John was involved in producing wood carvings which he is quick to point out are all hand carved and owe nothing to the lathe. He has been working in wood since the mid-1970’s, having earlier executed stone carvings when he worked and lived in the English Cotswolds.
John’s success as a wood carver has seen his work included in art exhibitions throughout the region. His reproductions in different types of wood of the Irish fauna is particularly striking, and is a big favourite with the many persons who over the years have acquired examples of John’s work. Now retired from landscaping and gardening, John, at 84 years of age continues to produce wood carvings, while indulging in his other hobby of breeding and showing prized poultry.
John whose parents were members of the Plymouth Brethern describes himself as a non-conformist. I was particularly interested to hear of his connection with the Plymouth Brethern founded by John Nelson Darby, a one time associate of Athy man Reverend Thomas Kelly of Kellyite fame. John’s un-prepossessing manner belies a wealth of experience on farms as far apart as Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and Greenstone Point in the west of the Scottish Highlands. The farmer cum artist has spent 47 years in south Kildare, more years than he spent in his native country and by his pleasant and gentlemanly manner has endeared himself to everyone fortunate enough to have met him over the years.
Thursday, January 18, 2001
John Worthly (1)
I first came across John Wortley nineteen years ago. More correctly I saw his wood carvings before I met the genial Englishman who has made his home in Ireland for the past 47 years. His story is of one man’s attachment to land, an attachment which has endured ever since he left the employment of a wholesale stationers in 1933. He was living in Surrey, just south of Croydon, at the age of 16 years when he started a poultry business. He recalls buying a 12 horsepower Morris car for £12.10s soon afterwards for his egg round, but energy and hard work was not then sufficient guarantee of commercial success. He soon gave up the uneven struggle but determined to stay working within the agricultural sector. Just before the start of World War II he spent six months without pay on a farm in Shropshire to gain experience of farmwork. His first job was as a stockman and as a driver to a farmer who fell foul of the drunk driving laws of the time. The farm was in Bichester, Oxfordshire, a noted hunting centre on the edge of the Vale of Aylesbury. While he was there World War II broke out but John as a farm manager was not accepted in the regular army and instead he joined the Air Raid Precaution Service. His next farm job was in Leicestershire where John started work each morning milking cows at 4.30am, finishing at 10.00pm, a routine endured for two days at a stretch, with every third day off. In June 1941 John married Joan whom he had met in art college some years previously. John was earning 48 shillings per week and provided with a farm house which the young couple shared with another farm worker and his family.
During the World War English agriculture was subjected to compulsory tillage control and War Agricultural Committees took control of farms which were not worked efficiently. For a time in early 1943 John worked as a farm foreman for the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, now well known as a major tourist attraction in the Bedfordshire countryside. When the farm manager was sacked by the Duke, John was offered his job, but only part of the house previously occupied by the departing manager. John showing a determined streak, took himself to another position, this time with the Land Settlement Association near Jarrow.
An industrial town on the River Tynne, Jarrow was associated with the unemployment and social unrest of the 1920’s. It was from Jarrow that unemployed men began the long march to London in 1926 to demand jobs from the Conservative Government. John’s job as farm manager and machinery officer with the Land Settlement Association was to work closely with the former miners and ship builders who were allocated land by the Commission.
He spent two years amongst the Jarrow folk before moving in 1947 to Great Raveley in Cambridgeshire when offered a job by the former manager of the Woburn Estate. John was now earning £400 a year with a house provided, two pigs to kill, free fuel, vegetables, firing and a car provided. A period of relative prosperity followed which soon gave way to thoughts of owning and working his own agricultural holding. So it was that in 1949 John bought a 20 acre croft in Scotland with rights on 7,000 acres of commonage. Crofting developed following the Highland Clearances of the late 18th and 19th centuries which compelled Scottish tenants to abandon their homes and to adopt a subsistence lifestyle as crofters on the fringes of the barren Scottish coastline. Each croft consisted of a small holding with grazing rights on common pasture. It was a way of life which led to poverty, emigration and the eventual de-population of the Scottish Highlands.
The Wortley croft was at Greenstone Point, a cold, wet, and windy outcrop of moorland 90 miles north west of Inverness. The nearest village was Aultbea. The local school was 8 miles distance while the local doctor had to make a return journey of 90 miles if he was required to attend the Wortley household. It was to Greenstone Point that John, Jean and their two children, Frances and Andrew made the long arduous journey from Cambridgeshire just four years after the end of World War II. Jean and the children travelled by train, arriving at a station 35 miles distance from their new home while John travelled from Great Raveley just south of Petersborough with all the family furniture in a small truck. The journey was made at a slow speed without an overnight stop with John and the truck driver alternating as drivers. They set out on a Monday early in the morning and finally reached their destination at 12noon the following Wednesday after a journey of over 700 miles.
Greenstone Point was and is an isolated Gaelic-speaking area where severe gales lash the landscape and the persistent rainfall buffeted by the wind seems to fall almost horizontally. Barley and potatoes were grown on the 20 acre holding, with certified shallots for seed purposes providing a particularly good crop in what was a virus-free area. The barley was used for feeding cattle, six of which were kept together with three milking cows. An annual trip was made to Dingwall Market over 100 miles away to sell the cattle and buy in calves. The eight mile daily trip to the one-roomed school in Laide, a crofting village on Grunard Bay, was made courtesy of the local travelling grocer. He collected the Wortley children and the children of their far flung neighbours for school, took the orders for the daily rations and returned children and the pre-ordered groceries that same afternoon. The seemingly idyllic setting of the 20 acre croft brought with it hardships and deprivations unimagined when viewed from the comfort and security of a farmstead in Cambridgeshire and inevitably the isolated farming experiment was brought to an early conclusion. The croft was put up for sale and the Wortley family moved southwards to Buckinghamshire where in 1952 John got a job as a farm labourer and what he describes as a tiny cottage to accommodate his family.
In 1954 John and the family were on the move again, this time to Ireland to take up a job as farm manager on the Tipping Estate at Bellungan Castle near Dundalk. Once the summer residence of the Dublin Castle rulers Bellungan Castle was in the 1950’s home to Evan Tipping, the famous Welsh operatic singer. John stayed for three years before moving southwards to County Kildare.
At 40 years of age John Wortley moved to Barleyhill in Moone to manage a 500 acre farm owned by Lambe Brothers, jam manufacturers of Dublin. Here he was to spend the second half of his career and unlike the many and varied moves made in his earlier years, Barleyhill and later Oldcourt would provide a more stable background for the one time crofter and his family…..[TO BE CONTINUED]…..
During the World War English agriculture was subjected to compulsory tillage control and War Agricultural Committees took control of farms which were not worked efficiently. For a time in early 1943 John worked as a farm foreman for the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, now well known as a major tourist attraction in the Bedfordshire countryside. When the farm manager was sacked by the Duke, John was offered his job, but only part of the house previously occupied by the departing manager. John showing a determined streak, took himself to another position, this time with the Land Settlement Association near Jarrow.
An industrial town on the River Tynne, Jarrow was associated with the unemployment and social unrest of the 1920’s. It was from Jarrow that unemployed men began the long march to London in 1926 to demand jobs from the Conservative Government. John’s job as farm manager and machinery officer with the Land Settlement Association was to work closely with the former miners and ship builders who were allocated land by the Commission.
He spent two years amongst the Jarrow folk before moving in 1947 to Great Raveley in Cambridgeshire when offered a job by the former manager of the Woburn Estate. John was now earning £400 a year with a house provided, two pigs to kill, free fuel, vegetables, firing and a car provided. A period of relative prosperity followed which soon gave way to thoughts of owning and working his own agricultural holding. So it was that in 1949 John bought a 20 acre croft in Scotland with rights on 7,000 acres of commonage. Crofting developed following the Highland Clearances of the late 18th and 19th centuries which compelled Scottish tenants to abandon their homes and to adopt a subsistence lifestyle as crofters on the fringes of the barren Scottish coastline. Each croft consisted of a small holding with grazing rights on common pasture. It was a way of life which led to poverty, emigration and the eventual de-population of the Scottish Highlands.
The Wortley croft was at Greenstone Point, a cold, wet, and windy outcrop of moorland 90 miles north west of Inverness. The nearest village was Aultbea. The local school was 8 miles distance while the local doctor had to make a return journey of 90 miles if he was required to attend the Wortley household. It was to Greenstone Point that John, Jean and their two children, Frances and Andrew made the long arduous journey from Cambridgeshire just four years after the end of World War II. Jean and the children travelled by train, arriving at a station 35 miles distance from their new home while John travelled from Great Raveley just south of Petersborough with all the family furniture in a small truck. The journey was made at a slow speed without an overnight stop with John and the truck driver alternating as drivers. They set out on a Monday early in the morning and finally reached their destination at 12noon the following Wednesday after a journey of over 700 miles.
Greenstone Point was and is an isolated Gaelic-speaking area where severe gales lash the landscape and the persistent rainfall buffeted by the wind seems to fall almost horizontally. Barley and potatoes were grown on the 20 acre holding, with certified shallots for seed purposes providing a particularly good crop in what was a virus-free area. The barley was used for feeding cattle, six of which were kept together with three milking cows. An annual trip was made to Dingwall Market over 100 miles away to sell the cattle and buy in calves. The eight mile daily trip to the one-roomed school in Laide, a crofting village on Grunard Bay, was made courtesy of the local travelling grocer. He collected the Wortley children and the children of their far flung neighbours for school, took the orders for the daily rations and returned children and the pre-ordered groceries that same afternoon. The seemingly idyllic setting of the 20 acre croft brought with it hardships and deprivations unimagined when viewed from the comfort and security of a farmstead in Cambridgeshire and inevitably the isolated farming experiment was brought to an early conclusion. The croft was put up for sale and the Wortley family moved southwards to Buckinghamshire where in 1952 John got a job as a farm labourer and what he describes as a tiny cottage to accommodate his family.
In 1954 John and the family were on the move again, this time to Ireland to take up a job as farm manager on the Tipping Estate at Bellungan Castle near Dundalk. Once the summer residence of the Dublin Castle rulers Bellungan Castle was in the 1950’s home to Evan Tipping, the famous Welsh operatic singer. John stayed for three years before moving southwards to County Kildare.
At 40 years of age John Wortley moved to Barleyhill in Moone to manage a 500 acre farm owned by Lambe Brothers, jam manufacturers of Dublin. Here he was to spend the second half of his career and unlike the many and varied moves made in his earlier years, Barleyhill and later Oldcourt would provide a more stable background for the one time crofter and his family…..[TO BE CONTINUED]…..
Thursday, January 11, 2001
Jim Brosnan
Go deo deo aris ni rachad go caiseal.
Ag diol na ag reic mo shlainte
Na ar mhargadh na saoire im shui cois balla
Im’scaoinse ar leataoibh sraide
Bodairi na tire ag tiocht ar a gcapall
Da fhiafrai an bhfuilim hiralta
O! teanam chun siuil, ta an cursa fada
Seo ar siul an Spailpin Fanach.
Learnt by rote many years ago in the local Christian Brothers School, the words of An Spailpin Fanach were brought to mind again as I attended, last week, the funeral of Jim Brosnan. Jim was a native of Listowel, Co. Kerry, a town immortalised in print by Fr. Anthony Gaughan whose book on the history of that town is a classic of local history. Of course Listowel remains famous for its annual races which fit neatly in the Irish Sporting Calender in the week following the All Ireland Football Final in September. For the readers of Irish fiction and those familiar with Irish Theatre, Listowel will be well known as the home of the literary triumvirate John B. Keane, Bryan McMahon and Seamus Wilmot. The latter two are now dead while the evergreen John B. is now retired but still writing.
It was from the same community which gave us Keane, McMahon and Wilmot that Jim Brosnan came and it was from there that he travelled to South Kildare as a young man of 22 years of age in 1952. He travelled with a number of Kerry men to work on the bog at Ballydermot and when his colleagues returned to the south west coast county Jim stayed behind in the short grass county where he was to make his home for the following 49 years. Jim, who remained a batchelor worked for a number of local farmers after he had finished with Bord Na Mona and they were all represented at Jim’s graveside last week.
Ned Whelan of Mountbrook, Hugh Colgan of Kildangan and Tim Fitzpatrick of Richardstown, Kildangan were some of Jim’s employer’s during the 1950’s and early 1960’s before he went to work for the Brennan family of Bray, Athy. Jim was to remain with the Brennan’s for almost 30 years. In more recent times Jim, a son of the soil from the Kingdom was a constant presence in and around the Streets of the Anglo Norman town which in its history and associations was a world apart from his native place. He returned to Listowel each year, his annual visit timed to coincide with the Listowel Races. Years of absence from his native County gave Jim a Kildare accent, or so his sister believed not realising that to the Kildare man’s ear, Jim had retained to the last, the rich mellifluous accent which was as recognisable as the McGillicuddy Reeks from which it was sourced.
Jim got a good send off from the townspeople last week and Fr. Caffrey’s sermon at the funeral mass that Sunday when he spoke of life as an unfolding mystery was a reassuring and timely reminder of the singular importance and value of every person in our community.
The winter months produce a flood of letters not all of which I can deal with as quickly as I should. One such letter, I recently received was from the Heritage Service of the Department of Arts which is responsible for the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH). The N.I.A.H. is carrying out a systematic survey of the Architectural Heritage of Ireland and currently they are engaged in County Surveys to record a selection of artefacts, buildings and structures of post 1700 vintage. They are about to commence their survey of County Kildare and would be interested in hearing from anyone with suggestions as to buildings etc. in this area suitable for inclusion in their survey as representative of the better elements of the built heritage of the County. Any suggestions or comments sent to me will be passed on to the survey team.
Of the many letters I received recently, most of them relating to family history research, one was of particular interest. It was from a Dublin based Journalist with an interest in local history who has unearthed a link between an Irish woman and Adolf Hitler. The connection stems from the marriage of Bridget Dowling to Hitler’s brother Alois in 1910 when Bridget was 18 years of age. Last July a local person passed on to me a copy of an article which appeared in the Irish Independent on the 15th July 2000 written by Myles McWeeney under the headline “The amazing story of the Irish Hitlers”. McWeeney who incidentally is not the journalist who wrote to me recently, claimed that Hitler’s sister in law, Bridget Dowling was the daughter of William Dowling “originally from Athy”. I believe that William Dowling may have been a son of Martin and Elizabeth Dowling of Crookstown, Ballytore and was born some time in the 1850’s or the 1860’s. Is there anybody who can throw a light on the Dowling’s of Crookstown, their son William or indeed their grand-daughter Bridget whose place in history is assured as a result of her marriage to an unknown German man in 1910.
Ag diol na ag reic mo shlainte
Na ar mhargadh na saoire im shui cois balla
Im’scaoinse ar leataoibh sraide
Bodairi na tire ag tiocht ar a gcapall
Da fhiafrai an bhfuilim hiralta
O! teanam chun siuil, ta an cursa fada
Seo ar siul an Spailpin Fanach.
Learnt by rote many years ago in the local Christian Brothers School, the words of An Spailpin Fanach were brought to mind again as I attended, last week, the funeral of Jim Brosnan. Jim was a native of Listowel, Co. Kerry, a town immortalised in print by Fr. Anthony Gaughan whose book on the history of that town is a classic of local history. Of course Listowel remains famous for its annual races which fit neatly in the Irish Sporting Calender in the week following the All Ireland Football Final in September. For the readers of Irish fiction and those familiar with Irish Theatre, Listowel will be well known as the home of the literary triumvirate John B. Keane, Bryan McMahon and Seamus Wilmot. The latter two are now dead while the evergreen John B. is now retired but still writing.
It was from the same community which gave us Keane, McMahon and Wilmot that Jim Brosnan came and it was from there that he travelled to South Kildare as a young man of 22 years of age in 1952. He travelled with a number of Kerry men to work on the bog at Ballydermot and when his colleagues returned to the south west coast county Jim stayed behind in the short grass county where he was to make his home for the following 49 years. Jim, who remained a batchelor worked for a number of local farmers after he had finished with Bord Na Mona and they were all represented at Jim’s graveside last week.
Ned Whelan of Mountbrook, Hugh Colgan of Kildangan and Tim Fitzpatrick of Richardstown, Kildangan were some of Jim’s employer’s during the 1950’s and early 1960’s before he went to work for the Brennan family of Bray, Athy. Jim was to remain with the Brennan’s for almost 30 years. In more recent times Jim, a son of the soil from the Kingdom was a constant presence in and around the Streets of the Anglo Norman town which in its history and associations was a world apart from his native place. He returned to Listowel each year, his annual visit timed to coincide with the Listowel Races. Years of absence from his native County gave Jim a Kildare accent, or so his sister believed not realising that to the Kildare man’s ear, Jim had retained to the last, the rich mellifluous accent which was as recognisable as the McGillicuddy Reeks from which it was sourced.
Jim got a good send off from the townspeople last week and Fr. Caffrey’s sermon at the funeral mass that Sunday when he spoke of life as an unfolding mystery was a reassuring and timely reminder of the singular importance and value of every person in our community.
The winter months produce a flood of letters not all of which I can deal with as quickly as I should. One such letter, I recently received was from the Heritage Service of the Department of Arts which is responsible for the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH). The N.I.A.H. is carrying out a systematic survey of the Architectural Heritage of Ireland and currently they are engaged in County Surveys to record a selection of artefacts, buildings and structures of post 1700 vintage. They are about to commence their survey of County Kildare and would be interested in hearing from anyone with suggestions as to buildings etc. in this area suitable for inclusion in their survey as representative of the better elements of the built heritage of the County. Any suggestions or comments sent to me will be passed on to the survey team.
Of the many letters I received recently, most of them relating to family history research, one was of particular interest. It was from a Dublin based Journalist with an interest in local history who has unearthed a link between an Irish woman and Adolf Hitler. The connection stems from the marriage of Bridget Dowling to Hitler’s brother Alois in 1910 when Bridget was 18 years of age. Last July a local person passed on to me a copy of an article which appeared in the Irish Independent on the 15th July 2000 written by Myles McWeeney under the headline “The amazing story of the Irish Hitlers”. McWeeney who incidentally is not the journalist who wrote to me recently, claimed that Hitler’s sister in law, Bridget Dowling was the daughter of William Dowling “originally from Athy”. I believe that William Dowling may have been a son of Martin and Elizabeth Dowling of Crookstown, Ballytore and was born some time in the 1850’s or the 1860’s. Is there anybody who can throw a light on the Dowling’s of Crookstown, their son William or indeed their grand-daughter Bridget whose place in history is assured as a result of her marriage to an unknown German man in 1910.
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