Tales from the Rugby fields

by
PJ (Paddy) Heneghan

In my secondary school years in Dublin’s Northside, 1939 to 1944, I played mainly Gaelic football and hurling.  Gaelic football is rather like soccer, save that handling the ball is allowed, while the game of hurling is like hockey, but it allows handling and hand-passing the ball, and is played with a stick called a hurley.

My interest in rugby started when a schoolmate of mine, Michael Ryan, invited me in 1944, immediately after I had left secondary school, to join the Clontarf Rugby Club.  I played with Clontarf for about two years, starting in 1945.  Paddy Lawlor was a member of the club and also one of my classmates at secondary school, St Joseph’s, Fairview (Joey’s to Dubliners).  In school he was a gentle giant. On the school’s Gaelic football team I had played left full back alongside Paddy, who was our full back. He was a fierce handful on both the Gaelic football and hurling fields, but on the rugby field a ferocious second row forward. He played rugby many times for Ireland and a number of times abroad for the British and Irish team, known as The Lions.

Starting in 1946 I went regularly as a spectator to high-level Rugby games, particularly to interprovincial and international matches, mostly at Lansdowne Road (now Aviva Stadium).  International matches were resuming in Lansdowne Road after the end of the 1939-1944 war in Europe, and the first of such matches I saw took place in Dublin in 1946 between Leinster and the ANZACS (a team that comprised de-mobbed service men of the Australian and New Zealand armed forces).  Ulster, to the best of my recollection, had been defeated 10-9 by the ANZACS in Belfast, but Leinster hoped to go one better.  The ANZACS match against Leinster was a cracking affair.  As the teams in the last seconds were heading for a drawn game, the Leinster out half Austin Carry (Old Wesley) went for a drop goal from midfield.  We watched open-mouthed as the spinning ball went high and goalwards, only to strike the very top of the right hand post and fall wide.  A truly prodigious kick deserving of a win, but it left Leinster with a mere draw.

The next match I saw was a renewal of the international series when Ireland played France at Lansdowne Road.  France was still rebuilding following the war, and was not expected to give Ireland too stern a test.  In fact an Irish cartoon artist in a Friday evening paper portrayed individually the French team he expected to see.  He showed the French second row forwards rigged out like a pair of ballet dancers, with embroidered jerseys, finished off with frilly knickers.  When the two players in question ran out on the field the following day, there was a gasp.  Moga and Soro (what apt horror movie names they had!) weighed in at a combined weight of 33 stone.  A Dublin ‘gurrier’, a type not often seen among the rugby elite, bellowed out from the back of the stand: “Jaysus, look at what Hitler did to them!”.  The French won the match, though not handsomely.  Ireland scored a penalty kick (three points) and the French managed a drop goal (four points).  Latterly the law has been changed whereby a drop goal now counts only as three points.

In pre-war international rugby Ireland had not been considered a potent force.  All that changed in the period 1947 to 1950 with the advent in 1947 of Jack Kyle at out half.  I attended the 1947 match against England, ‘the auld enemy’ (often referred to as ‘the base, bloody and brutal Saxon’).  An Irish journalist in a post-match commentary confessed that when he saw the young Jack Kyle running onto the field with the Irish team he shuddered at what might be in store for the youngster. He described Jack as looking like a tousled-haired school boy!  He need not have worried about Jack.  Ireland won the match 22-0, in no small measure due to the jinking, sidestepping and sheer genius of the tousled schoolboy!

In 1948 and 1949 I attended Ireland’s matches when they won back-to-back Triple Crowns (victories over England, Scotland and Wales in each season).  In 1950 I travelled to London for the match against England in the expectation of seeing Ireland’s Three-in-a-Row materialize. The match was a grinding affair, with England leading 3 - 0 as the second half drew to a close.  Then to our delight after a set scrum well into the second half, Ireland’s scrum half crossed the line for a try (5 points).  But the score did not stand, The referee called the teams back to retake the scrum.  Arguments still rage to this day about that decision to repeat the scrum. There was no further score in that match and thus ended the dream of Three Triple Crowns on the trot for Ireland.

Bed time stories

by Paddy Heneghan

Bed time stories were not really a feature for me when I was a child. The first book I have memory of was about a little bug called Bucky. The graphics gave him the shape of a ladybug.  He was involved in some sort of war.  Bucky Bug went around in a small airplane and the sky in the graphics was invariably filled with exploding missiles.  Luckily Bucky’s girlfriend was a nurse so that, no doubt, she would be around if Bucky happened to get shot down.  She was called June Bug.  I have no memory of the storyline.  I must have been about seven when I had this book, as I was able to read the story for myself.  I have no idea who bought the book for me or why I was so enchanted by it, or indeed why it has remained so long in my memory.

I must say something about my mother, who never read any stories for us.  I often think of an old joke that had been doing the rounds and is still useful to me when I want to have a bit of banter with friends.  When somebody asks me what I’m doing just now, I reply: Why, I’m finishing a book.  Which leads to the remark: Oh, I didn’t know you were writing a book.  To which I reply:  I didn’t say that I was writing a book.  I am reading a book.

My mother might well have been the inspiration for this joke.  She read a book and her choice never changed: it was Gone with the Wind.  My mother almost every evening prior to getting the tea (in those days the tea was the main evening meal) she went to her bedroom for a siesta, or a rest as she called it.  As soon as she had settled herself down she started reading her book.  She usually fell asleep after reading a few pages, after which the book either fell to the floor or would be found beside her in the bed when she woke up.  She never used a book-marker, and found it hard when she next resumed reading to remember where she had left off.  So she kept going backwards and forwards continually, and never got to finish Gone with the Wind!

My mother used often tell us that she never got a proper education.  She was the eldest of seven children – five girls and two boys - and of course was enrolled in school like the rest of her siblings.  Her mother, she told us, constantly kept her, the eldest, at home from school to help with the housework and to mind the younger siblings.  Accordingly mother missed many of her classes in school.  This maybe is why she never read us bed time stories.  It also might explain why she seldom wrote letters and why, when she did write, she always had a small dictionary by her side to aid her spelling.  How she would have loved it today when many kids have a computer with a spell-checker!

Spelling was not mother’s forte.  I once came home from a night on the town, and mother was poring over a crossword puzzle in a children’s magazine.  I’m completely stuck here waiting for you to come home, she said to me.  I can’t get beyond No. 2 across: What animal carries its house on its back?  I had a look at where she was stuck.  Now, I said to her, if you would just put in snail instead of snale for No. 2 across, you’ll be away in a hack!  And so it turned out.

I will be writing about my mother elsewhere because what I have written does not do her justice.  Herself and the following two sisters were beautiful, calm and affectionate ladies.  The fourth sister was contrastingly bubbly and excitable, and went off to New York with her husband, a dentist.  The fifth (the only one of my aunts who did not marry) was too enigmatic for me to attempt on the spur of the moment to find a suitable adjective to size her up.

My father was the one who read me stories, but they were not bed time stories.  He was a farmer’s son who had a good career as a railway employee.  From time to time he loved to take me, the eldest of three brothers, to the nearby Dublin Botanic Gardens to see how the staff tended the various plants in the vegetable section.  On our walks to and from the Gardens we would converse in Irish, which was his home language in the West of Ireland .  This helped me immeasurably in school.  After the inspection of the vegetable plots we would sit on a bench in the Gardens, and he would read for me, in English, tales based on the legends of Ireland, where I learned about the exploits of Fionn McCool, Cuchullain, Diarmuid, Grainne, and others.  On our walks we often argued over phrases in the Irish language.  He spoke the Connemara dialect while my school teacher taught me in the Munster dialect.  Father listened patiently while I told him where he was going wrong, and he patiently explained that his way was how his mother spoke Irish to him.

The books that father read from were kept in a bookcase which was in the parlour at home.  This was filled mainly with classics, and I can remember such titles as Sketches by Boz, Angel Pavement, A Trail of ’98 and so on.  None of these attracted me, and that applied particularly to A Trail of ’98.  In fact I misread the title as ‘A Tale of ‘98’, which I thought was a historical novel about the Irish Insurrection of 1798.  When eventually I ventured to read it, it turned out to be a very tender and romantic story about the Klondike gold rush in 1898.  I am still trying to find a copy of it to re-read.  The bookcase also had a gap which awaited the eventual return of Gone with the Wind.

My father took an interest in the books which I took out on loan from the Phibsborough Public Library.  I remember I took out on loan a book on the life cycle of frogs, which had a chapter on the frogs’ reproductive system.  Father thought that this was unsuitable reading at my age and requested me to return it, which of course I did.  He little knew how knowledgeable I really was in these matters.  In going to and coming from school we passed a shop which dispensed animal medicines.  In the window was a set of graphics displaying the reproductive processes of various farm animals.  These were an adequate substitute for a lesson on ‘the birds and the bees’.  In addition I had on the way home one night after attending a local cinema, the experience of assisting at the birth of a calf in a shed off Deverys’ lane.  An agitated man called me from the street that night asking me as a matter of urgency to help him with an animal in distress.  The animal was a cow, and after entering the shed half way down the lane I got the task of pulling on a rope while the man manoeuvred a calf into the world.  I did not mention the incident to my father, feeling that if he did not like my reading about frogs he would certainly not like to hear that I had been involved in some bovine gynecology.

My uncle Tom (father’s brother, who also lived in Dublin) was the person who added further to my reading experiences.  He was single at the time I was attending secondary school, and he gave me presents of books on a wide variety of subjects.  We children were generally somewhat lukewarm about Uncle Tom’s choice of gifts, as he tended to give us ‘useful’ presents.  Gradually to our bookcase were added copies of The Arabian Nights, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and similar classics.

Uncle Tom’s list of educational accomplishments was lengthy and varied.  As a native speaker of Irish he had earned a scholarship to attend Galway University and acquired BA and MA degrees there.  He also acquired a Higher Diploma in Education (HDE) which qualified him as a teacher.  He then got a travelling scholarship and attended post-graduate studies in the university of Bonn in Germany where he became fluent in German.  He followed this with post-graduate studies in Grenoble in France, thus adding French to his languages.  When finally settling down in Dublin, he worked as a translator in Dáil Éireann (the Irish Parliament).  Somehow he managed to qualify as a barrister-at-Law (LL.B degree) and went on to become the Chief Editor of Irish Publications in the Department of Education.

On my visits from time to time to Uncle Tom’s office, he told me about his experiences in Bonn and his introduction to the German language.  He seemed to detect that l had a feeling for languages and gave me many copies of books which he had edited.  To my amazement these included several Spanish dramas which he had translated into Irish and were regularly in demand in Irish drama circles.  Strangely he never spoke to me in Irish: for my developing fluency in Irish I had to thank my father.

One of the books which I got from Uncle Tom and which greatly helped me in my secondary school Irish studies was Gnás na Gaeilge by Cormac Ó Cadhliagh (Usages in the Irish language).  This in due time helped me to get the highest mark of all the candidates in the Irish paper in my entrance examination for the Civil Service in 1944.  Over a thousand competitors sat this examination and my result really astounded me, since many of the candidates would have been native speakers of Irish.

So the experiences of my early days, despite the absence of bed time stories, left me with a good repertoire of Irish legends, and a good knowledge of the Irish language with the capacity to acquit myself comfortably in all of the three provincial Irish dialects.  My father and uncle also left me with a bad case of bibliophylitis, otherwise known a bookaholism, so that today I cannot pass a bookshop without an overwhelming urge of enter and rummage around.

I can say that if my forebears never read me bed time stories, they did, in their unconventional ways, serve me very well with the means of acquiring in due time a host of stories for my own children.

The Christmas Turkey

(Paddy Heneghan writes here about a visit during Christmas holidays in the 1940s to The Square in Tralee where his grandmother bought her turkeys for the Christmas period.  The Square in Tralee is first mentioned in records back in 1613.  The area was low lying and a marsh developed where, hard to believe now, turf was once harvested.  The houses were built on higher ground giving The Square its present shape. It later became a market place and cattle fairs were held there. There was also a thriving fish market.)

The Christmas Turkey

In former days one of the adventures of the Christmas holidays in Tralee was to help Grandmother Foley of Moyderwell when she visited the Market to buy some of the provisions for the festive period.
A good Christmas turkey was an essential item on the shopping list.  These were the days before turkeys were bought fully eviscerated, ready to cook. Prior even before they were sold “New York Dressed”, that is, with the head, feet, and viscera still intact. Grandmother’s turkeys, however, were bought alive and kicking!

Grandmother usually bought three or four of these birds. They could be bought live from the dealers, mainly country folk, who brought their produce to the town market. One in particular of the turkeys was bought for the Moyderwell Christmas dinner and had to be of the highest quality.  Grandmother chose it after careful scrutiny. She poked her finger all over the bird.  A good meaty breast was essential!  This turkey was usually a 16-pounder, as there were rarely fewer than a dozen present for the dinner.


The other turkeys were selected for later important festive occasions.  There was one for the New Year’s Day dinner, and one for the dinner of 6th January (Little or Women’s Christmas as it was referred to locally, or in ecclesiastical terms The Feast of the Epiphany).  In between these dates there was the turkey which would be the prize for the annual post-Christmas card-fest in Grandmother’s kitchen.  There the card-game of Thirty-One was played out in five rubbers, by the most murderous group of card-players in town.  Three of the Foley sisters took part, as well as Grandmother herself who was ordinarily most well-spoken, but in the course of card-play she permitted herself some unbelievable blood-curdling imprecations on those who crossed her.  The kids of course were confined to the parlour while the card-games were in progress.
The turkeys were kept live in the stable at the rear of the Foley house in Moyderwell.  There were regular specialists resident at home who could be charged with the various preparatory tasks before the turkeys reached the table.

A Christmas Visitor, 1940

by PJ Heneghan

In the old days for us kids every Christmas spent in Tralee was wonderful.  I was six years old when our family in 1933 left Tralee to settle in Dublin. After the move we returned to Tralee at least three times every year to visit our grandmother, but the Christmas visit was always the highlight of each year.

The Christmas of 1940 was particularly memorable. The fact that a war was raging in Europe and that supplies for the festive season were becoming scarce had little impact on us. In fact our isolation on the edge of Europe only added to the excitement as we followed developments on the Continent.

That Christmas we arrived at our grandmother’s home several days before the Great Day itself.  Grandmother announced that we had a visitor.  A Dr. Foley had been installed in the lodger’s room upstairs and he expected to be with us for a few days until his car had been repaired.

The story was that Dr. Foley was on a journey from Dublin to visit friends in Dingle when his car developed engine trouble, and he had to leave it in the Kerry Motor Works for repairs.  The company told him that there would be a delay of a day or two as they had to get a new part from Dublin.  Dr. Foley went to one of the local pharmacists to find out where he might get congenial lodgings for what he hoped would be a brief stay in Tralee.  It helped when Paddy Walsh, the pharmacist, told him that he might just find a vacancy at Moyderwell with a Mrs. Martha Foley.

Grandmother usually kept one lodger at her home, and it happened that the incumbent gentleman had left the room vacant while he went home to County Cork on his Christmas vacation.  Pat, as we called him, was an inspector with the Department of Agriculture.  Pat was a very miserly person, and he refused to pay Grandmother rent for the period when he was away.  Grandmother saw no option but to accept this. The poor foolish woman also agreed that Pat, pending his return in January, could leave his clothes and personal effects in the room over the Christmas period.  Pat well knew, of course, that grandmother would find it hard get a lodger just for the Christmas period.

Dr. Foley therefore came like manna from heaven. There was the moot point whether grandmother should clear the room of Pat’s effects during his absence.  She had scruples about the letting to Dr. Foley, although not about the doctor personally.  He was after all a Foley, one of the clan, so to speak.  All grandmother’s scruples were overcome when Aunt Chriss – her daughter, a widow, who also lived in the house with two of her young children – argued that Pat could not expect the room to be left idle when he had paid no rent for the period of the vacancy.

And so, on our arrival from Dublin, we came to sit around the fire in the parlour late on the evening of 22nd December 1940, chatting with Dr. Foley, who had just returned from the cinema.  He had taken to the cinema with him Aunt Chriss’s daughter Eileen, a comely young lady who enjoyed the unexpected treat.  He had also returned with a box of chocolates for grandmother, and she was well pleased.  As we chatted the goodies were being shared around.

My brother Frank, aged nine at the time, had just started to take piano lessons, and he was persuaded to perform a few party pieces.  Dr. Foley was most impressed, and urged my mother to spare no expense in developing this talented child. He discreetly asked whether money would be a problem, and offered to help if necessary.  He promised my mother that he would speak to some officials of the Dublin College of Music, where he had good friends who could help.  (To quick-reel ahead for a moment, Frank was later to become the head of this very college.)

The following day we occupied ourselves helping grandmother in her visits to the market, opening the envelopes with her arriving Christmas cards and affixing stamps to the outgoing mail, and generally at her request doing odd jobs around the house.  Meanwhile, Dr. Foley came and went, but told us that that he hoped to leave on Christmas Eve for Dingle, as he expected the car would be ready by then.

On the 24th of December Dr. Foley left.  My father arrived from Dublin late that evening and my mother filled him in on our impressive visitor and of his extraordinary interest in Frank. They figured that as they spoke the good doctor was with his friends in Dingle.

Christmas came and went.  We attended Midnight Mass, visited the crib, had our usual turkey and plum-pudding Christmas meal, enjoyed our children’s party on St. Stephen’s Day and stayed up in the parlour late each night, while in the kitchen the adults played ferocious rounds of a card game called “31”.  Occasionally we tiptoed into the hall and enjoyed listening to the sounds of slaughter and post-mortems which emerged from the kitchen at the end of each game.

At the beginning of January, life returned to normal.  My father had gone back to Dublin, while my mother, two brothers and myself stayed on as usual until the 6th of January when the school holidays ended.

The drama started on the morning of 2nd January 1941.  Pat returned about 11 am.  I remember, as if it were yesterday, the commotion that broke out on the top floor.  Pat was arguing loudly with Aunt Chriss in his room and then came out onto the landing, roaring that Mrs Foley should attend at once in his room.  Where were all of his shirts?  Where were his stockings?  Where were his jodhpurs?  Pat’s work, I should explain, involved walking about in muddy farmyards and sodden fields which required him to wear knee-length stockings and short britches.  All of the clothing which he had left in his room was missing – except for a pair of old braces, coloured green, white and orange, an army issue from his service in the LDF (our local defence force, established at the start of the war period we called “the emergency”).   Grandmother was not the kind of person to respond to peremptory demands in her own home, but on this occasion she thought it better to go up to the top floor to see what was amiss.

Grandmother told Pat about the nice Dr. Foley, but it began to become clear that the clothes so carefully hoarded by Pat were now “gone west” – possibly to Dingle.  Pat, the miser, had it seems for over a year been hoarding shirts, socks, ties and indeed anything that was likely to become scarce with the war increasingly likely to last for some time.

A formal post-mortem took place in the parlour, the whole family being present. We all contributed.  Some remembered Dr. Foley’s comings and goings during his stay, and how he appeared very slim when returning to his room, but rather well upholstered when going out.  He frequently asked for bowls of hot water in his room.  Why was that?

Grandmother went to see the pharmacist.  Yes, of course, Paddy Walsh remembered Dr. Foley, for he had referred him to my grandmother and later, several times, supplied him with morphine for a patient. This might explain the need for bowls of hot water.  The Kerry Motor Works on the other hand did not remember Dr Foley at all!

There seemed to be no other option at this stage but to go to the civic guards, but Pat refused point blank to consider this.  What would his Department think?  Someone in his room, with access to his clothes and his papers!  Well, to his clothes anyway – the papers had not been touched!  Aunt Chriss later aired her suspicion that Pat had also been using his bedroom as an office, and was likely to have been receiving an allowance for this from the Department.  Did the allowance, she wondered, continue to be paid in his absence?

It was decided not to bring the police into the picture just yet.  What proof positive did we have that Dr. Foley was a thief?  The talk went on, but no action was taken.

About the middle of January when all of the hullabaloo had died down, Aunt Chriss was walking in Strand Road, at the other end of the town, when she noticed a couple walking slowly ahead of her.  They were deep in conversation.  The man looked a little like Dr. Foley, but Aunt Chriss could not be quite sure.   The lady was one of the very respectable local family, a nice girl but not exactly in the first flush of youth.  What should Aunt Chriss do?  What if she were mistaken?

The matter was quickly decided for her when the man paused for a moment, bent over, and adjusted the stocking on his right leg.  It pulled up away above his knee.  Definitely one of Pat’s missing hoard!

Aunt Chriss doubled back and went into the Garda Station, which was at the entrance to Strand Road.  The guards responded immediately and took the good doctor in for questioning.  There was really no contest!  He confessed at once to the theft and was duly detained pending his appearance in the district court.

The full picture emerged at the hearing.  “Dr. Foley” was Peter Wavin (not his real name), released in mid-December from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin.  He had hitch-hiked his way to Tralee.  His was a very sad story.  He belonged to a very respectable family from the midlands and had had a good education.  He had become hooked on heroin following a long and serious illness.  On arrival in Tralee he had called to the County Hospital and conned the Reverend Mother into parting with £5.  He visited the Prior of the Dominican Church with greater success, receiving £10.  He then set up temporary headquarters with grandmother. The remarkable feature of the case was that he had made no attempt to work his charms on the Foley family, except to borrow the name as a platform for his further operations.  His crombie coat was liberally provided with pockets, which enabled him to clean out Pat’s store of clothing.  When arrested he had been (Aunt Chriss’s conjecture) sizing up the single daughter of the Strand Road family as a prospective spouse, but fortunately for her there this did not come out in court.

Dr. Foley was sent off to Limerick Gaol for a period, the length of which escapes my memory.  We never heard of or from him again.

It was a memorable Christmas indeed.  As con-men go, “Dr Foley” was up there with the best!

Decimalisation: This will never take on in Wexford, Mr. Morrison!

by Patrick J Heneghan

The approach of D-Day in Ireland was one of the challenges that the country had to meet in 1971.  “Going decimal” with our currency was to happen in tandem with the British.  11 February 1971 was the date fixed for the introduction of the new decimal notes and coins in Ireland.

For the first forty years of my life to 1971, we had been used to dealing with the complication of having 20 shillings in the Irish pound and 12 pennies in the shilling. We also had farthings.  The penny was divided into four farthings, which were tiny coins scarcely the size of the nail on your small finger, just about enough for a child to buy a few boiled sweets. The ha’penny (halfpenny) coin was worth two farthings.  The new system was to divide the pound into 100 pennies.  The old penny was then worth 0.42 of the new penny.

My earliest recollection of a money dealing was at age five when I went with my pal John Donohue to the grocery shop at the end of our terrace in Tralee, and put a penny in a slot machine.  I lost my penny, but a kind neighbour, seeing my distress, relieved it by pretending that I had overlooked to take my winnings out of the pay-out slot. She gave me the handsome amount of two pennies, an two-to-one win.  I was cute enough to know what she had done, bless her heart! – and I had sense enough to keep away from the one-arm bandits from that day on.

One of the skills we had to learn in school was to be able to total columns of cash figures.  For book-keeping there were three columns.  The pound column carried the sign £ on top (a stylized letter L for libra), on the next column was s (for solidi or shillings) and on the third column was d (for denarii or pennies).  The notations for the new decimal columns were just two, £ and p (for pounds and pennies).

It was publicly announced that initially the old and the new coinages were to be circulated in parallel, until the appointed day came for the use of the old coinage to be discontinued. In the interim, shops were to display price-tags on goods in both the new and the equivalent old currency.

Obviously it would be necessary for the civil service in which I worked to familiarise itself with the new system, and a post of “Decimalisation Officer” at Assistant Principal level was created to promote the new system.  This post was to be filled by open competition from within the Departments.   Many of us tried for the job, and the eventual appointee was Harry Morrison, an officer from the Department of Local Government.  He was an excellent choice: he was a skillful presenter and he was also endowed with a wonderful asset and a sense of humour.

I was present on several occasions when Harry addressed meetings for civil service and semi-State personnel.  His presentations were a combination of useful information followed by Question-and-Answer sessions in which he related his experiences, some of which were quite hilarious, particularly the tales he brought back from rural areas.  Some of his answers to the questions thrown at him came in the form of witty one-liners.  Had he been in Hollywood, he would have given Bob Hope a close run for his money!  An earnest young man from an assurance company had a problem stemming from the fact that his company’s contracts were all set out in the old L.s.d currency.  The company’s solicitor had advised that the clients’ premiums had to continue to be dealt with in the old currency.  What advice could Harry give him on this problem?  Harry’s response was short and sweet:  “Get a new solicitor!’.  (Sustained laughter)   There was an old lady in Wexford who one evening, after having listened attentively to what Harry had to say, came around afterwards to congratulate him.  ‘That was a wonderful speech you gave, Mr. Morrison,’ she said, ‘ but you know – that’s never going to catch on in Wexford’.

In the various Departments local Training Officers held meetings for the various grades of staff who would have to meet the requirements of the changeover.  I was in the Central Training Unit of the Department of Finance and a few days before D-Day the Unit called together the heads of all Departments (i.e. the Secretaries, now styled Secretaries General) to satisfy them and ourselves that there were no loose ends out there that we did not know about.  We had about thirty persons in attendance, as some of the Secretaries brought their deputies with them. On the final one of the three days we spent on our work we set up small tables and divided the attendance into groups of four.  On a sheet on each table we placed one of a series of questions touching on situations of a type we felt would be commonly met with when D-Day arrived and the two currencies would circulate in parallel.   One example of what we set out will give the flavor of exercise.  Take for example the question on Table 7 the discussion of which was particularly memorable:

At most of the railway stations some incoming travellers will wish to buy a newspaper or periodical from a waiting newsvendor.  D-day has arrived and you have a mixture of coins in your pocket, as does the newsvendor.  The papers you usually buy cost nine pennies old money.  You take your purchases and give the newsvendor on shilling ‘old’ money. What change will you get?

Most of the ‘trainees’ arriving at Table 7 spent a few minutes pondering the question, and after that lively exchanges began.  Then the notebooks came out and juggling with figures commenced.  Just as it seemed that faction fights might break out, a training officer intervened and asked the group if they would like to move on, and said that the Table No. 7 question and others would be discussed at the concluding session.

The answer to the Table No. 7 question is:  You should get either three pennies old money or one penny new money.  Remember the newsvendor will have to make dozens of these decisions without delaying his customers.   Most vendors of low-priced goods would have worked out for themselves well in advance the various combinations likely to be tendered, probably far more efficiently than the civil servants who devised the new system.  It was up to the purchasers of items such as morning papers also to have their mode of payments worked out in advance and tender the right combinations of coins, or risk being ‘jipped’ of a small fraction of a penny on each transaction.  In the example, receiving change of three pennies ‘old’ money would represent no problem to the customer, but a customer receiving in change one penny ‘new’ money would suffer a loss of 0.26 of one penny (new money).  Most street vendors however were not likely to run out of coinage of either the new or the old currency.  For purchasers of goods of higher value, vendors such as shopkeepers were supplied with official conversion tables, which relied on a certain amount of rounding up of prices, so that what customers lost in the swings would be recovered later in the roundabouts.  Provision was also made for goods to carry dual- price tags.

At the end of our training session, we managed to tie up all the loose ends – or very nearly did so.
Only one question remained: “Is there anyone now who does not know what the changeover to decimalisation is all about?’ Only one hand was raised and the question was: ‘What exactly does the term D-day stand for?’  The individual in question, I believe, had to apply later for early retirement!

How did it all work out in the end?  Long before the use of the old coinage was to cease, the public had adapted to the decimal coinage.  There were complaints that a general rise in prices followed decimalisation, a phenomenon that was found to have occurred also in other countries that changed over to the decimal system.  Inflation, of course, said the politicians.  It never goes away!  - and they of all people should know.

Granduncle William Nolan, Able Seaman

by Patrick J (Paddy) Heneghan, (The Meandering Milesian)

Grandmother Foley of Tralee was the third child of the family of great-grandfather George Knowling, who died in a drowning accident in Waterford Harbour some time in the middle of the 19th century.  There were seven children in his family, five girls and two boys.

The Cruel Sea: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end (W.Shakespeare).

William was the youngest of the family, which over time changed its name from Knowling to Nolan.  He took to the sea at an early age.  This is what I first saw and remembered about Granduncle William from visits when I was a child to Grandmother Foley’s home.  His photograph was hanging in a prominent place in the Tralee kitchen, a stern figure in the uniform of the British navy.  Grandmother never accepted the fact of his death in a Canadian warship called The Royal Edward, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1917 off the coast of Turkey.  She told us that she spoke to a survivor from the sinking warship who visited her when the war was over.  He told her that there was virtually no chance that William had survived.  Nevertheless grandmother firmly believed that her brother, who had survived thirteen shipwrecks, probably managed to reach the Turkish shore, and could well have settled down there.

Stormy Waters and Strong Gales

Lighthouse on Skellig Michael (off the Co Kerry coast).  Credit: Wikipedia

by Patrick J. (Paddy) Heneghan (The Meandering Milesian)

 

My mother used to tell us about "The Night of the Big Wind" (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire in Irish literature).  It is recorded that on the 6th-7th January 1839 a violent storm hit Ireland, causing massive damage not alone in the town of Tralee where she lived, but all over Ireland. Winds reached a force beyond any others in living memory. It was more than just an “ordinary” storm.  It left trees uprooted and did considerable structural damage. According to meteorologists, speeds up to seventy miles an hour can be expected during such violent storms.  I am not aware that the wind on the occasion in question was scientifically recorded.

Unfortunately I can remember very little of the detail recounted to us by my mother, who had had it from her father. He in turn must have had the details from his own father, whose family were merchants in Tralee at the time of the event. The heavy iron gates of the County Gaol in Ballymullen, my mother said, were lifted by the storm and deposited some distance away.  She had heard a story about an “ass and cart” which had been lifted bodily from one street to another, an occurrence which the animal had apparently survived.

For reasons other than the memory of the January 1839 event, my mother and her family were never very easy when storms were brewing. There was a foreboding about high winds which haunted my mother and grandmother, and “trimmings” were always added to the family Rosary for sailors and others at sea.  My grandmother’s father had drowned in Waterford Harbour late in the 19th century when a sudden squall upset the small craft from which he had been fishing. My mother’s uncle William (grandmother’s brother), while engaged during World War I in an action against Turkish troops, was drowned off the Turkish coast from a Canadian warship, the Prince Edward.