Throwback Thursday: Cork boy’s project on beloved great-gran

that trick mentioned in Throwback Thursday a couple of weeks back, of blocking the Button B slot in a public phone box so that callers couldn’t get their money back, but the kids could?

Here is a belated confession from Alf, of Glasheen Road, clearly operating on the belief ‘better late than never’.

“I a gang of us stuffing a phone box near the end of Magazine Road with paper, and coming back in the evening to collect the pennies. People copped on after a while though.”

Alf also shares another, this time truly outrageous practice from his misspent youth.

“Something we tried a few times was, if we came across a friendly dog on our travels around Magazine Road/College Road/Western Road, and the dog had a collar with an address on it (of a big house!), we would bring the dog around with us for the day, avoiding the area near the dog’s address.

“In the evening, we would bring the dog back to its house and knock on the door. We would tell the owner that we found the dog in Blackpool and were bringing it back home. Concerned citizens, etc. Much shuffling of feet while we waited for our hoped-for ‘just reward’. Once, we got a half crown and we must have thought we were the Elon Musks of the early ’70s!”

Hang on, did the dog get a treat out of co-operating like this? Surely he should have been cut in on the deal?!

But then, his owners probably spoiled him rotten when they got him ‘safely’ back…

Alf, you’re a disgrace! But I can hear the laughter of readers from here.

Now, most of the correspondence we get on these pages is from older Corkonians, but here is an interesting exception, showing that the younger generation can be just as interested in the days of yesteryear.

“Hallo, Jo. My name is Dean Horgan, I am 13 years old and a first year student in Glanmire Community College. Our history teacher (Ms Reeves) has entered our class in Discover Cork. This is a history project competition.

“The theme for this year is the stories all around us, so I decided to do my project on my great grandmother (Angela Keohane).

“One of the provisos for this project is to publicise it, so Ms Reeves said to email Throwback Thursday and see if you could help.”

Dean thoughtfully attached the documentation of his project, and we must say he has done a thoroughly good job, not only in the research but also in its layout, showing his sources and getting hold of old photographs as well as providing neat chapters to the work, with descriptive titles.

It is not for us to pre-empt the Discover Cork competition, but we can give some detail of what Dean discovered and recorded about his great grandmother: her birth at Bessborough, adoption, happy childhood, growing up, marriage, and rare and important facts about her knitting for Blarney Woollen Mills, sewing for her family, collecting buttons, making do and mending in times when life was harder here in Cork, right through to her death, surrounded by loving family .

All this information is neatly and consecutively described, in a document that will now provide interest and pleasure for subsequent generations of his family.

Well done, indeed, Dean, and we can only hope that this excellent Discover Cork project will result in many more young people asking all the important questions of their elders and researching and recording all they can of their forebears.

Do we need to stress it to all of you yet again? If you have a memory, a recollection, images of the past, and of special people who affected your life, write it down!

Send us any experience or incident that for one reason or another has always stayed in your mind, and we will be delighted to publish it.

Also, though (and this is important), keep a record for yourself, and gradually build up your own family history, so that future generations can read of what you did, what your parents and grandparents did, and what life was like here in Cork before they were born.

If you don’t, then all that knowledge will out of the world when you go. Do it now!

Somebody who definitely took that task to heart is Noel Dillon, whose heart-warming reminiscences of childhood summers in Graball Bay, Crosshaven, have often delighted readers of Throwback Thursday.

Noel has worked for years on all those happy memories of youth, and finally succeeded in creating a whole book, which he has had specially printed for his family and relatives, so that they may also know of his younger days and the many personalities with whom he interacted back then.

A whole lovely book of stories, recollections, of people and their doings, events which seemed epic at the time, of disputes, arguments, happy days out, small tragedies, all the stuff of life in long-ago Crosshaven.

He has called his magnum opus Golden Days, and although he has chosen to alter identities (Crossshaven becomes Rockhaven, for example, and siblings bear different names), it will certainly be clear to his relatives who is meant and the circumstances to which he refers.

Some of the chapters are created as stories in their own right, but throughout the book the actual daily life of the village is a constant backdrop, with endless sidelines which beg to be followed up.

There are fascinating tales of how the whole village banded together to their own, and it makes stirring reading. As do the many tales of romances blossoming or meeting with disaster, sad tales of forced emigration to find work, and, especially, the conception and building of that greatest of dance halls, the Majorca (called the Caribbean in Noel’s book, but we know where he means!)

There are days out on boat trips, the founding of a Tidy Villages group, a bridge club, the work of the boatyard, the growing summer traffic of visitors to this holiday haven.. it’s all here.

Above all, Noel has portrayed a very clear picture of the incredibly strong sense of community that pervaded the Crosshaven of his youth, where everybody knew everybody, and all problems were sorted out in serious discussion, either in the pub or in someone’s kitchen.

You didn’t the law, you didn’t send insults on social media, you got together and talked it all out.

So far, Noel’s Golden Days has only seen a private printing, but who knows what else will come from this great recorder of happy, long-ago times?

We will all want to share in those sunlit stories of yesteryear. And yes, the sad episodes too. They’re all part of our own heritage and our own experiences.

Well done, Noel, for actually getting it done. Most of us talk about writing it all down, but for the majority, that’s where it ends.

Now, the rest of you, make a start by sending us your own memories. And then get going on recording everything for your descendants to enjoy.

Noel Dillon has also, and very thoughtfully, sent me his memories of that part of the Northside where both he and I grew up – Summerhill, St Luke’s, Dillon’s Cross.

“I knew your father, Joey to see, about whom you wrote on Throwback Thursday, and his exploits on his motorbike,” said Noel. 

Long ago, youngsters would tell tales of his feats on the motorbike which were so outlandish as to be unbelievable! But that was the way it was with my childhood friends.

Well, most of them were actually true, Noel, since my dad was always itching to be trying some new adventure, looking to far horizons, whether it was taking his push-bike on a tramp steamer to get to Europe, or making that first trip with the motorbike up Carrauntuohill.

He never stood on his head on top of the Savoy, though, and was quite cross when I taxed him with that escapade.

“Of course I didn’t! I climbing up and walking around the edge of the roof once, but I didn’t stand on my head there. Why would I?” He paused for a moment, then added: “That was on the roof of the Crawford Tech, for heaven’s sake.”

To return to Noel and his memories: “You also wrote about Mossy, who would deliver vegetables to your house from McAuliffe’s shop on Summerhill. Mossy actually had three jobs simultaneously – in the morning delivering milk to the houses, then the vegetable run for McAuliffe’s, and finally as a caretaker and cleaner at Shandon Boat Club.

Mossy (Murray) would call to our house on the Ballyhooley Road each morning, and would pour two pints of milk into a big jug, then always adding ‘a tilly for the cat’, about an eggcup full extra.

That was a nice old tradition, Noel, wasn’t it? You had the same in olden days with the ‘baker’s dozen’, when generous shop assistants would add an additional bun to the 12 you were buying. Or those sweetshops (well known to all the neighbouring kids who wanted the best value for their pennies) where you could be sure of an extra acid drop, clove rock, or bullseye being dropped into the bag after the scales had gone firmly down. Does anywhere still do this, I wonder?

“I Mossy calling to our house with the milk, coming in and sitting down in the kitchen while we were having our breakfast,” continues Noel. “He always had the news or a good story to tell.

“I recall him telling me when Joe Kelly (later to become Fr Joe Kelly), a famous senior Cork hurler, whose family had a small grocers’ shop in Dillon’s Cross, had ed Glen Rovers because he could not get his place on the Brian Dillon’s junior hurling team.

Another story Mossy told me was that Joe Kelly ran the 100 yards in ten seconds when he was a student in Farranferris! If Mossy told me, I accepted it as a fact. It was always fascinating how one story led to another.

“Mossy lived alone in a small terraced cottage at the beginning of Ballyvolane Road, directly opposite Flynn’s, the milk vendor for whom he worked. He could be seen regularly standing at his hall door in the evening, exchanging salutations and banter with the ers-by. He knew most, if not all of them. Ah, an innocent and carefree time.”

Noel, details like that on local deliveries and the people who carried them out are like gold dust to researchers because they are so often forgotten.

Didn’t we have stories a while back about a man who delivered by horse and cart all over the city, whistling all the time he worked? We need more of these recollections of the less well-known Corkonians, rather than those who went into politics or ran great businesses.

None of the ‘big shots’ would have succeeded without the solid phalanx of workers below them. Let’s honour them all!

Send us your memories of those who worked around your childhood home, those who ed by every day, those who only came on special occasions (anybody the chimney sweep? The coal men? The ‘treasure’ who came in to do the heavy cleaning?) Email jokerrigan1 @gmail.com or leave a message on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/echolivecork.